Rumpus Original Fiction: Counting
It’s not the first time you do it, but it is the first time you get caught.
Fiction
214 posts
Rumpus Original Fiction: The Photograph
Over time, I detested how the woman jealously occupied his heart so that no other woman ever stepped into our lives or our house.
Rumpus Original Fiction: Hóngmén Banquet
“This is a homecoming,” he’d announced to the girl who took the order, “don’t let our mouths or cups go empty.”
Rumpus Original Fiction: Pulmonary
If I stand in the middle of my home and wingspan my arms out, I can touch the insides of my mother’s left lung, wall-to-wall.
Rumpus Original Fiction: Loss
I thought about that Chupacabra at the farmhouse, ripping those goats to shreds. He was my fucking hero.
Rumpus Original Fiction: Get Gone
Every customer with perfect lipstick and a hard-lined face reminded me of Mom. We hadn’t spoken in nearly a year.
Rumpus Original Fiction: Let All Our Ghosts Depart
This is what beauty was, she said. This is what beauty made you into.
Rumpus Original Fiction: A Note to Say Hello, I’m Here
“I don’t know why the hell he chose to live here, of all places. Sometimes it feels like the loneliest city in the world.”
Rumpus Original Fiction: She Walks in Fields of Light
I don’t know if she’s dangerous, or crazy like they say. But in this deadening place, she’s the only live wire.
Rumpus Original Fiction: The Dollmaker
Sakshi can lay me over her workbench, unstitch my skin, stuff me with fur, and then sew me. She can weave her magic into me. Make me not be myself anymore.
Rumpus Original Fiction: Storytellers
The first thing I learn is that storytelling is a strange art. Listening to stories all my life has not, in any way, prepared me to tell my own.
Rumpus Original Fiction: Dream People
I am embarrassed by how it scares me, getting older. By how the fear has guided every decision. By the math I’m always doing in my head, working back from fifty-two. If I die at the same age my dad died, Brody will be twenty-six, which is old enough.
