Rumpus Original Fiction: Chicken
I used my fingers on the neighbor and he liked it.
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Join NOW!I used my fingers on the neighbor and he liked it.
...more“Things can catch fire even when they let each other go. But we don’t give up. We don’t stop loving them.”
...moreOur next Letter in the Mail is from Janice Lee!
...moreThe only thing I can count on to be there tomorrow is my body. And yours.
...moreStaring at that profile picture, I couldn’t not click.
...moreThe immune system, meant to protect a body from foreign invaders, works too assiduously, sees danger where there is none, turns on itself. Such conditions lend themselves to metaphor.
...moreI don’t remember when [my brother] ran away; I just remember him being gone more often than not.
...moreAlana Massey discusses her debut collection, All the Lives I Want, the best piece of writing advice she’s ever received, and acknowledging the work that women do.
...moreI held an image in my mind of my daughter and me in a small rowboat and I’m rowing, rowing, rowing as hard as I can, away from this sinking ship.
...moreIt paralyzes me to think about the sacrifices my family made before I was in my mother’s womb. When they came here they knew they would lose a part of their language, their memories, their sanctity of self.
...moreLeah Kaminsky’s debut novel, The Waiting Room, depicts one fateful day in the life of an Australian doctor and mother, Dina, living in Haifa, Israel. Dina is trying to maintain normalcy as she goes about her work as a family doctor, cares for her son, and fights to preserve her faltering relationship with her husband, […]
...moreWhen I was young, she would tell me we were part Navajo.
...moreWhen I took those breaths, I also learned to say, “I am enough, I am enough, I am enough.”
...moreAsali Solomon discusses her debut novel, Disgruntled, narrative structure, the mythology of memory and place, and returning to Philadelphia after years away.
...moreI was four years old when my mother taught me to lie. There were certain instances, she explained, when lying was acceptable, when it wasn’t even lying, really.
...moreKnow that you are trying to steal from a naming ritual and culture that goes back five thousand years.
...moreI have no answers, but I can feel my feet.
...more(Dan Weiss is out on tour with his band The Yellow Dress. He’ll be back on August 3rd.) Anti-dentite. Being an American girl is expensive. A daughter’s revenge. The metaphors of ants.
...moreThe first thing my parents bought when they earned money in America was a giant bag of almonds as a talisman for success.
...moreIn Japanese martial arts, the uke is the ‘receiver’ of the technique, the one who attempts to attack their sparring partner, the tori. The tori defends against the attack of the uke, who usually winds up on the floor after getting flipped, swept, thrown, punched, or kicked.
...moreMy daughter likes to bang her head off the floor. It makes a point—an especially guilt-tinged one, given that we had to get rid of our carpets due to a mold infestation, so now there’s no cushion between baby cranium and wood.
...moreI’m sitting across from the man who looks exactly like my father would look if my father had lived to be fifty-seven. If my father hadn’t died sixteen years ago when I was thirteen. But he did.
...moreRumpus contributor Micah Perks has a new eBook out on Shebooks called, Alone In The Woods: Cheryl Strayed, my daughter and me. Micah Perks’ candid short memoir takes an insightful look at women and the wild, the wildness she experienced as a child on a commune in the Adirondack wilderness, the ways women and wildness […]
...more“This is eulogy material,” my father says as he explains this logic. He preps me, teaches me what to say, how to stand. “Remember how he used to draw symbols on his socks,” he begins…
...moreI’m a student, I say. My teacher has told me to go to a cemetery and find a stone, any stone, that speaks to me. I chose Kenda’s because hers gave more information, more anything, than any other stone I saw in the one cemetery I visited.
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