fiction

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…

Your daddy had the kind of laugh you can tell came from the belly. It was genuine, heavy with something like freedom. What even is freedom in this city where we had to be mean or invisible to be queer?

They will toss longstanding marriages to the side, witnessing Saba at her most desirable, opening up like a flower, a corpse flower, titan arum, her body beaming compelling signals that cannot be ignored. And she will be receptive to this,…

i feel as if i could write an intergenerational graphic novel. something something about how my father came to the u.s.

When your home is built near a highway, you witness all the different ways people try to escape this brutal, smattering thing called living. In an explosion. Plunged into a car. Over the overpass. Once, on your ninth birthday, a…

There is no skin left. No muscle. No accessible anatomy whatsoever. Just two gleaming shells shut tight.