Rumpus Original Fiction: Daughterhouse
When things begin disappearing from the house, I know what is happening. My mother has always been good at taking what she is owed.
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Posts Tagged: Rumpus Original Fiction
From the Archives: Rumpus Original Fiction: Emergency Lifeboats: 24 (12 on Each Side)
“What’s a six-letter word for ignoring truth,” she might say, without looking up from the puzzle.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Good Little Animals
“No remedy will undo your bad choices, or your addiction to sugar. And you can’t afford my prices anyway.”
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From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: Three Flash Fictions by Niyah Morris
The lasso was a gaping mouth that opened wide enough, we hoped, to swallow the cloud.
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From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: No Good
The sounds that she would expect here are entirely absent. There are no cries, no weeping. Just soothing, muffled tones.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Chicken
I used my fingers on the neighbor and he liked it.
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From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: Mr. Burley
My favorite was usually the smallest, the most alive.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Prepare a Table Before Me, Anoint My Head with Oil
Before I understood that I was a girl, I understood that I was a body.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Rapunzel House
“Don’t worry,” he says. “Give it time. It’ll grow on you.”
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Rumpus Original Fiction: You Are One of Them
Everyone here is new. Everyone has run away from somewhere.
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From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: An Other Man
This is a carousel that never slows to a point where you can board gracefully.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Black Bottom Swamp Bottle Woman
. . . maybe they believe labeling and understanding mean the same thing . . .
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From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: Forty-Six
Waiting to turn forty-six is like standing in the unrelenting sunshine.
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From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: Footnotes on a love story
Before they were married, they met in a photograph.
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From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: Mustard Seeds
At the end of the week, which was long with sleepless nights, Miri picked her heart out of the kitchen sink, put it in a paper lunch bag, and took it to the witch.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Bloom
The bloom would not open until we arrived, but it was not waiting for us. It was a matter of timing. Each year in mid-March, the petals uncurled from their fetal sleeping positions, stretched out to face the sun.
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From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: Today, You’re a Black Revolutionary
The important thing to remember when climbing a pole, a rope, a mountain is to not look down.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Nacho
The benign lipoma floated in a small jar that Abundio had set on his nightstand when he came back from the doctor’s office. At first, when Dr. Reyes had asked him if he would like to bring it home, Abundio had laughed in the belief that this was nothing more than obtuse doctor humor. But Dr. Reyes did not smile and waited for a response to her question. So, Abundio said: “Sure.”
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Inheritance
When she was seven years old, Lottie killed her first rattlesnake. As long as she could remember, her grandfather had instilled in her that The Good Californian killed the rattlesnake, spared those behind him the danger of snakebite, the venom sapped from their future. She thought it was allegory until she came face-to-Western-face with a Mojave rattlesnake in the scrub out by the foothills.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Scale
With my first blood, a scale appears, hard and iridescent in the soft skin below my arm. In bathroom mirror light, elbow raised, I press and prod, fingertips rusted from menstrual discovery. They trace red, which soaks into the skin and blossoms more scales, reflecting blue and green. I wash my hands. And the scales […]
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From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: On the Last Day, the Ancestors Came
If this were the end, May needed to see.
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FROM THE ARCHIVES: Rumpus Original Fiction: Sabbath
There’s something about stillness that always comes just before the miracles.
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From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction—The Christmas Party
I laugh. My laugh, this thing that sounds better on somebody else.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Self-Possession
The words blur, become meaningless. You need them to be meaningless.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: My Mother Fires Guns
You are never really at peace with what you haven’t gotten.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: What Wasn’t
She gave him a small, relieved laugh. In another world, she replied.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: shadowman
he lives in closets, stalks young kids, & takes them in the middle of the night.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Being the Baby’s Heart
I took a deep breath. A long one. And I started rocking again.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: On Sight
You stood and put your hair up. It made you a different man. You got hard and decided you were why.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: A Disappointment
My miraculous children were mine, and mine alone.
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