Rumpus Original Fiction: Prepare a Table Before Me, Anoint My Head with Oil
Before I understood that I was a girl, I understood that I was a body.
Fiction
220 posts
Rumpus Original Fiction: The Bridal Set
The salad was plump, squealing things I couldn’t understand. I remembered feeling a deep sadness that everything in the world wasn’t painted green, the best color. I hungered for green. The gift of sunlight flecked on leaves, the pale chartreuse of American money.
Rumpus Original Fiction: White Ash
My wife, Ritu, a receptionist at a motel, works four nights a week. In the morning, I pick her up in our used Honda and drive her home. After she…
Rumpus Original Fiction: Rapunzel House
“Don’t worry,” he says. “Give it time. It’ll grow on you.”
Rumpus Original Fiction: The Night of in Tangas
The problem for my father was the same. He had no money to buy confetti and to top everything off he now owed the price of two corundas.
Rumpus Original Fiction: You Are One of Them
Everyone here is new. Everyone has run away from somewhere.
From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: An Other Man
This is a carousel that never slows to a point where you can board gracefully.
Rumpus Original Fiction: When Will You Arrive?
We do not have lovers, if so there would not be need to reply or congregate to these stupid events, because the language of two people together is the exclusionary body of themselves. In the absence of a body, we settle for Snapchat . . .
Rumpus Original Fiction: Black Bottom Swamp Bottle Woman
. . . maybe they believe labeling and understanding mean the same thing . . .
Rumpus Original Fiction: To Go
Love can feel muddled, vast, diffuse; so little to do with the singular volatility of a firework. I hunger for that kind of crystalline precision, though. That clarity. To scream myself across the sky just once—consuming everything in my wake—and then vanish from view.
Rumpus Original Fiction: Only Humans
Hearing old people’s memories is like watching a once-in-three-generations downpour. In the past, they lived in abundance and air conditioning. So many details go over Salwa’s head. She doesn’t know how to transcribe all the words.
From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: Forty-Six
Waiting to turn forty-six is like standing in the unrelenting sunshine.