Short Short
The Self-Help Writer
There are too many women on this syllabus. Don’t review us. There is too much inside of us. more »
Feeds
New things had happened all the time, and were to have been learned. We read well and closely, were always reading, really, growing well-versed in versions of ourselves. more »
Apology for Brother
By the time I touched it, I knew it was a penis and not a cashew. more »
Spoon
Tim and I were in bed together when he saw the spoon. I’d accidentally left the closet open, I noticed, at the same moment he said, “What’s that?” and I knew exactly what he was referring to more »
Alone in a Small, Small World
Why do we do it? Why do we find ourselves perpetually crossing county and state lines, early in the a.m., hungry, dazed, half-drunk, half-asleep, and whole-alone? more »
The Loneliness Diet
At night he would lie with his head in her lap, tonguing the newly formed skin, learning its salty smoothness. He liked that these new, shiny patches had yet to suffer the abuse of daily living. more »
Illustrated Girl
I stretched out on the carpeted floor and allowed my co-workers to move around me, stroke me, to flip me over, and over again. more »
illuminated destruction
…this couch is not the kind you’d want to fall asleep on. it looks like a giant band-aid, curing something self-inflincted. max and i know, without knowing, each other. he is a bruise; a few shades darker than me and geometrically… more »
Terry & Tawny & Lucinda
Tawny is a girl and a girl is a flower. A girl is a rhythm. A girl is a train riding tracks. more »
The Last Moonshiner
All the voices coming from the holes in the ground were talking to themselves, sometimes shushing themselves, too. They were hiding from the Bully, the one that got Popcorn. more »
Swear
I’m in the car with my childhood sweetheart. We’re lost on hometown streets, houses lined up like headstones. more »
Our Family
My mother’s made of plastic. All her parts. In her, one stores solids, fluids, leftovers, even garbage. more »
Flash Flood
That night around the fire, after she’d coughed up more water than he thought could fit in a person’s lungs, Manuelo sat and listened to her talk about a white tunnel of light and her life flashing before her eyes—clichés, yes, she said, but true. more »
Fever
The room is small in its warmth. I feel swollen in the dim glow of a low fire and a sputtering candle. I am alone, save for my son. more »
Out by Munson Creek
"Give me my blowgun," Harry said. Kyle handed him the blowgun from the floor on his side. It was dark and cool and we were on a county road sixty miles east of Dallas. The sky was autumn clear; a quarter moon hung low on the horizon. more »
Dr. Krauss and the Worst Possible Universe
Meteors are drifting down through alien skies. My eyes wander up from the curbside, over the hair and heads of my friends. more »