fiction

In the old days, these convention events had been scripted, safe. Now the network still had to maintain the FCC’s decency standards despite the president’s profane speeches and ad lib remarks. Radical bluntness, he called it.

It’s easy to be the protester. Something is always wrong. Imagine how hard it is to be the protested? Have you considered how much work goes into designing and maintaining a system of control that allows everyone, if they have…

When together, even the most ardent slime colonialist could not have drawn a border between your slime and mine. Slime planes carried us across oceans of slime to faraway slimelands which were, in the end, much the same as our…

“Decomposing,” they said, slowly, trying it out under their breath. The word felt different than the ones before—which could be a byproduct of having only half a mouth now. Or, maybe, it was finally the right one. Their heart raced…

I don’t care that our mothers are sisters, or that we’re supposed to be friends because we are cousins. With you dead, the whole summer will take a different direction. I won’t have to share the bed in the middle…

He imagines birds arriving in droves to bathe, drink, and preen. Their small beating bodies crowding this vanity he has made, sounds of their reverie like the soft plinks of coins dropped in fountains.

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…