Fiction

We’ve become vegan since moving to Oregon this fall for jobs as adjunct writing instructors, Norma from Chicago, where she’d had to flee “her Virgo stalker,” and me from New York. We’d both dropped out of PhD programs and received…

Now, I breathe deeply through the searing pain and think how our bodies can learn to endure anything, how we develop new standards for pain and we think these new standards make us stronger. But is it strength to bear…

The jokes about being found under a bridge now became a haunting possibility. My mother had passed away years ago and I was estranged from my father. I tried to think if Mom ever mentioned the circumstances of my birth.…

He remains mesmerized by Almost Alice, but because she got off at Metropolitan-Lorimer, she is no longer perfect to him. This Williamsburg Bermuda Triangle of bars is a thirsty cesspool of transplants. Alice would never. But he knows what he…

All teeth tell a story. You were a smoker. You were malnourished. You were an addict. You completely forgot they existed.

Every surface I’d touched seemed to flinch from me, like I’d done something wrong. Then the drip came back. One. Two. I sat on the kitchen floor and cried, and it wasn’t because the dripping came back, it was because…

I ask that my parrot remind me how to breathe. He complies. I take the cue from him as always. Thank you, he says, I say. Papa telling me when I was a child, inhale, inhale, inhale. The village doctor…

This place wasn’t for us, we didn’t deserve it, we didn’t belong. We had only come to play a temporary game of pretend. I missed our old furniture, how everything was made of wood with real density and nothing fit…

Someone once told him that that was what salt did: made things taste more like themselves. That was the world right now: more itself than it had been ever before.

Helen and I had been friends since the first year of our ex-patriatism—friends in the way that twenty-something women could be: seemingly out of the thin air in which we flew and flocked together like birds, the loudest caw-er organizing…

The first time I met you, your hand pantomimed that I should brush my hair off my forehead, sweep the heavy strands to the side. Nearly eight years old and playful, I responded Nice camera you got mister.

Blanquita is pregnant again. Mom is so sad. We miss you. The corn is coming in okay this year but the fish in the river keep dying. Last night at sunset, I could have sworn I saw you walking through…