fiction

She had been a good friend when she had to be, and somewhere in all of this time we’d forgotten how to speak to one another. Now, she has come to me in this early stage of grief. I wasn’t…

“All my life is telling obstacle from sweetness and i must smell to know – i smell everything for its scents – i smell rock most often – wet wood – i smell linoleum, hair of dog, smudge of olive…

“Zoe feels panic rising from her pelvic floor, then guilt and more anxiety about her own animal response, the cortisol bath leaching into her milk which will then permeate Pippa’s gut and become part of her DNA and Pippa’s entire…

That was summer. In the autumn, you fly to see him. The address is a narrow lane off the canal, where tourists recede and street signs wilt in their place. The buzzer is broken, he has to come down to…

I probably should have lied and told him it got dangerous. I lived alone. No safety net of a brother or a boyfriend to fall back on if a murderer broke into the building and got past the doorman, past…

We had both gone to Mount Tabor High School and mostly discussed that over our nuggets. We knew all the same lore. The high school basketball coach who famously said, “It’s not gay if it’s for practice” to the six…

He talked on and on then, about how you’d have to get to the airport very early in the morning or else miss your flight, the X-ray machines at the security, the little cans of soda and bags of pretzels…

I wasn’t good at managing the cold. It wrestled the breath from me, pressing deep into my chest and throat. Once, when I knew Rob would be out, I cheated and put the heating on, sitting against the radiator and…

Simone diminished the flame of curiosity in Isabella Fernanda to a quiet ember. Alexandria was actually relieved. The sticky food in her mouth had already indicated she wouldn’t be speaking further on the subject anytime soon and tilted her body…

When I first met Matteo—that is, when we were both eight years old—I had the habit of falling madly in love with anyone who shared a desk with me. A boy would ask to borrow a sheet of notebook paper,…

It was Keefe’s first run since the wildfires, a week after an orange glow of an apocalyptic sky had greeted them one morning. Day 182, though she had stopped marking the calendar in Sharpie at Day 122, too depressed to…