Certain things become more difficult in these circumstances. For example the whereabouts of small objects. We put the seals with our names on them in a pouch, the pouch inside a bag, and we carried the bag to the car, drove the car up the hill, and we went far enough up the hill that ...

This script, these are-they-letters, these slashes of movement upward and away from her; she stares at the sign, waiting and ignorant, wanting someone—a quick and benevolent God she does not believe in but prays to out of habit—to grant her understanding. To give her instant literacy, a way out of this subway tunnel and a ...

Styrofoam I cried. You said, “I still have your things.” Now there are three big boxes on my porch. I sit down on the bedroom floor, drive a rusty blade-cutter through the tape. At the bottom of the box I find a small black case. I open it. I see the ring you sent back. I pick ...

Hair is soft and shinny (she has a few flyaway hairs). She has NO haircuts, trims, re-root, missing or thinning plugs. She has no green ear (has never been treated for green ear). Some slight discoleration in the earring holes, not detected with the necked eye. May be shadow from the light. She has no ...

This person I was feeding myself to – in order to pay out everything I had, told me to try to lie sort of still. Try not to let it all work loose at once, he said. He didn’t approve of the way things had got themselves bowled into corners and exposed to the air, which is ...

Dr. Mackinaw entered and took my left foot in both of his rough hands. He had a thick silver mane, completely different from Thomas’s sparse brown curls. Dr. Mackinaw said something to me, presumably about what he was going to do next, but I didn’t hear it. I was too busy thinking about Thomas’s hair. ...

My brain, my little slug. I need to get to your switchboard more often, I need to flash-clean your wires. With a q-tip, some aloe? My brain, my ally, my poor, porous pet. My misery and mentor, my doorstep cousin. I love you, and the world treats you so inordinately. My full frontal interface, my poor ...

It was a Saturday, and Mother had, months before, scheduled a luncheon in honor of the arrival of her best friend—all the way from Kindergarten!—Cindy Marcona née Smith at the Swan House, where chicken salad was apportioned into hollowed-out puff pastry swan bellies and adorned with honeydew melon cut to closely resemble wings. They also ...

Definition: Brainfulness is the acknowledgment and practice of rational empathy by accessing all core vortexis of the brain via psychedelics and communication with those who are on the clear path… Jolene Hopewell wrote her widely ignored yet influential treatise, The Brainfulness Manifesto,  after a lifetime of institutional sexism and years of spousal oppression, then momentary recognition ...

When he was a boy in Iran, my father avenged the deaths of a flock of pigeons by dashing out the brains of a cat. He’d made pets of the birds, fed them stale lavash, felt comforted by their throaty coos. Seeing them afterwards—bodies separated from wings, bits of beak, tips of toes scattered in ...

Not being able to successfully interview bundles of joy, we may make the bold but reasonable guess that among the first things we learn about space, having very recently arrived in it, is that we can’t just leave it. We can move ourselves around in it, and we can be transported in it, but the ...

Trees bend in the wind like pipe cleaners. The woman finds the mild breeze reassuring. She is surrounded by grass, sand, and wood. Today will be a fine day, she thinks. It is a good day to be alone. The woman picks up her canvas bag and heads toward a path made of corded rope. She will ...

She woke up with a face like it’d been punched. She recalled a dream where she shoved her lover, with a hand at his neck, one at his hair, shoving him down, but she wasn’t punched. She questioned whether she’d ever been violent in dreams before. Violent and disciplinary. In the dream she thought of ...

She skins carrots at the kitchen sink while her children play hospital in the back garden with the neighbor boy, Jack. She catches their fake adult voices and phrases like ‘code blue’ and ‘dead on arrival’ and ‘paging Doctor Wheeler.’ She is Sandy Wheeler, wife to Sergeant Wheeler, her husband shot in the chest from ...

When I stopped by last week after a dentist appointment my parents wanted to show off all the new improvements.  They were like, “Great to see you, let’s check out the new improvements!” This was my chance to find my birth certificate so I could figure out my moon sign. Mom led me into her room ...

In the City, everything is crooked. The buildings, the window sills, the cops. The cars all have unlocked doors, so you don’t break the window trying to get in. The grand railroad station is in Gotham style, and the old Hotel has air conditioners and bed covers from the seventies. I walked up the Avenue, and the men ...

The Jury says We find you fatherless. The Jury says We find you fatherless, motherless, without genealogy. The sun in this room is bleached thin. The wood in this room is blond. The wood in this room gleams. The wood in this room is well cared for. I ask to call a witness and am granted. I call Sister, ...

Because she wants her friends to see the extraordinary repeating bloom of her orchids, the woman turns the five potted plants on her kitchen windowsill so that their big Georgia O’Keefe crotch-n-petals are facing the room the night before the guests are due. When she pads down to the kitchen in the morning however she ...

Of course we were thrilled when our friends called us all to say they’d be in town Christmas. We hadn’t seen them for years.  When we graduated we all swore we’d get a land share and raise children and vegetables communally, but our friends moved west alone after the rest of us realized we needed ...

There was once a man who lived in a house made of wood at the edge of the city, near the swamp. On the other side of the swamp, goods were made, and so, trucks and trucks full of goods shot past his house each day and went on into the city. The man’s house was one room, ...

People lose things in all sorts of ways. Carl and I were in the garden when I lost my arm. I was harvesting tomatoes from the plants we had grown and diligently watered, and he was pruning the stems from the basil. He asked for the shears that were beside me--the large gardening shears used for ...

The sister’s eyes possibly were spilling rainwater as the sister took off her wet sweater and shoes. “Can I take your ---?” the woman asked. “No, I never take it off,” the sister said.  “But you’ll be jealous!“ she said. “I was just at Treasures and Trash. They were selling silver --- glasses in a silver foot.“ “For ...

“Our plums in Nablus are bigger and sweeter than your plums. Your plums are sour and small.” My cousin Zayna threw a plum over the garden wall. “Look even the boy who is grazing the goats on your land wouldn’t let them eat the plums.” The small plot of land we owned behind our garden was ...

I am to deal with Dad’s finances; he makes me a manila folder of ink-faded receipts and unopened envelopes from places like “Larkey & Smith, CPAs,” and “Final Notice - Remit Payment Now.” He used to be good at handling things. He says, “I used to be good at handling things,” and struggles to scoot his chair back, wood feet ...

I was going to write about celebrity beekeepers. I’d been brewing an elaborate tale in my head for weeks about Solana, the diva, who only eats babaghanoush and suns herself on patios while her bees feed on peach blossoms outside her bay window. And about Rhonda, the feisty one, who attends awards ceremonies in cocktail dresses with no ...

Nikki goes up the deer cut with the ax and a box of trash bags. At the top, Coy Hawkins is gone. She opens her mouth to call him and thinks she doesn’t know what to say. “Hey,” Nikki says. “Down here. Watch your step,” Coy Hawkins says. Coy Hawkins is down on the rock ledge, squatted by Renee. He ...

The artist cured Ursula’s corpse in a mixture clear and yellow-green like dew. When revealed to her mother, when he was not quite ready, she said how her daughter looked like a marble statuette rosy with having been formed by a man. In fact he had rushed to the job and brought almost no materials with him. She ...

Two gorgeous girls eating oranges in LA. You know? Babes in tiny high-waisted shorts tugging thick rinds off, yum, pungent fruit, their legs going on and on and on, one long bar of sunlight bouncing up each one— One girl's mother was shot in Costa Rica, 1994. She owned a brothel on the outskirts of a ...

DID YOU DIG UP THE LAVENDER? We took the dogs up the hill, past the fig trees and apricot trees and I used to pick limes and lemons. Our garden came to harvest in the summer and I picked while you watched. I planted the hibiscus. I planted the pears. How big are they now? Did you dig up ...

Eve She had no memory of her childhood. This troubled her, somewhat, when she would take long walks by herself. Everything so empty and open. I had no life before I met you, she told him, and she meant it. Do you need company? the man would ask and try to follow along with her but ...

Lucia wears too much make up. My boyfriend has a crush on Lucia. For months now I have been stealing looks at her when she undresses at work. About four months ago she started to gain weight. Every day when she walks past a mirror in just her bra and panties she stops, sucks in all the ...

I wondered if it was possible I’d been older once. When I turned 14, I felt sure I’d already lost my virginity, but I couldn’t remember specifics of even having kissed a boy. I felt experienced, but I didn’t remember enough to bother with all the courtship needed to be sure, so I just went on believing. I ...

“Gosh I love you!” I said to Jim, after he fisted me to control the real love I felt for this other guy, Paul, a plumber and a natural fister, not a fighter. Jim was a man I wanted to grow old and die with, and a man who has just been fisted by Roger. There ...

New York. 1981. The cops are on the horn again.  They say there are reports of a child running up and down FDR Drive.  The news has just come in over the radio.  The child is standing in the middle of the highway, pointing at the large green signs overhead yelling out the exits to the ...

Every day when she comes home from work, Lucy undresses in the foyer of the home she shares with her husband. They have been married for four years. They’ve loved each other longer. She removes everything she’s wearing. She sets her earrings, bracelet, necklace on the small stand where they keep their keys, mail, a ...

a vanished page from The Vanishers I awoke to my alarm at 6:30am. I’d had a dream, this is what I naturally assumed since the vision too directly involved me. A psychic visitor was a spy, not a meddler; I had impacted events, and this suggested that I’d simply, and meaninglessly, dreamt it all. (My Workshop professors, anti-Freudians ...

“Let Me All Day Dazzle You,” he said, cock flopping while he mopped. It was my birthday and so he wanted to do something good to distract me from the bad of this, the years ticked, that sick ritual. The sugar stunk of chalk, so making cake was out. Also, he found two dried mice drowned in ...

In March the wind starts blowing at sunrise and doesn’t stop until well past dark. I say “sunrise” and “dark” and “in March” because that’s when I was there. Think of a baked road, a gas station, a taco stand. A few homes where the fishermen live and dogs. The dogs are everywhere. A leathery expat ...

I like a hand close to my vagina. A hand at rest; still but not stiff, calmly stationary. There can be no anxious twitching or scratching in the hand close to my vagina. The hand cannot want anything but to stay there. It is not as if my vagina is constantly under attack. I’m not saying ...