Fiction

The longer she stayed in the water, the better the numbness felt. She dipped her head back. How easy it would be to slip in just a little bit further. Clothes swollen with silt and midges and snow fleas. Heart…

We grow extremely fertile. We are super wombs. We conjure orgasm on command. We menstruate painlessly and our blood is glitter and heals cuts and scabs.

I was not always gentle with my body. I slept with older men, with sad men, with finance bros and community organizers. I liked the med students best, angry orthopedists-in-training and the fuckboys clawing their way to anesthesiology.

Years passed by in a vaseline blur, sticky and tactile. His body was a glue trap that gathered all kinds of flotsam: unexplained bruises, living room stick-n-pokes, fat gained and lost. Performing made him feel sexy in a way that…

I am held in place by twenty-two thin steel rods and the silence of the disappeared tone, and the only certainty I have left in the world is that this man, for reasons no one can explain, can do this…

The sticky traps had remained empty except for the one in the alcove of the spare room. There I’d found the stricken body of my former invertebrate friend, prostrate in a layer of residual gloop. I’d squinted up close, considered…

We lived in a place for people who did not matter. No one considered it a town—just an overpass above the freeway, dry fields to the east, overgrown hills to the west, a place cars passed under without stopping. We…

Because now, every time she dared to look out the turret window, she saw the transgenders gathered in the gardens below, staring up at her. Their skin glowed faintly phosphorescent. Sometimes their tongues would flick free of their mouths as…

She’d decided, fully cognizant of what I was, to sentence me to a future spent experiencing the depth of other people’s hatred of people like me.

Anamika learnt from her mother that the fate of the beautiful was to belong to the rich, to help upgrade their genetic pool till an army of their rich and beautiful offspring ruled the world. Natural selection by devious design.…

On the beach, the rough sand between his toes, the boy thought he heard someone whisper from behind. Had a villager walked out to meet him, he would have heard first their legs parting the long reeds, then their feet…

Some nights, when the feeling gets too strong, I have to get out of bed and walk out to the edge of the yard where I can see the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, their massive shapes like felled…