The car burns as I sleep fully reclined in the driver’s seat. The acrid plastic smoke wakes me. The smell of burning dolls. A crowd clatters out from the cliff top café next to the tourist car park, the cook banging a thick fist on the driver side window. The smoke curls its heavy weather…
Category: Fiction
Objects in the Gas
It was a Monday when my mother asphyxiated herself in our 1988 Camero, locked behind the electric garage doors that never worked when it frosted. She had three things with her: a banana skin, her wedding veil and my dad’s wristwatch. She had pulled the pin at exactly three thirty to offer us the comfort…
Eager Platinum Hands
Chaaya is everygirl, she wants her arms removed immediately. For when the chief surgeon engineer gives her better-quality arms she will play better, faster, throw the ball higher than the other little girls and make the baseball team when she finds high school in America. Her mother does not approve; she wants a complete daughter…
Siberia
Eleven days after my husband died, he telephoned me at dawn. “I can barely hear you,” I said, sitting up in bed. “Somewhere in Siberia,” he whispered. His notebook was still on his side of the bed. I wrote in the half-light. The directions were incredibly complicated. I had to ask him to repeat himself…
The Year Our Children Left
This was the way our children left, in the year they left us behind. They got all–how shall we put it–self-righteous and accusatory, the way children can get when they come to understand that nearly everything they’ve been told is some form of a lie. They said to us, how dare you? How dare you…
Mr Lemming
I bite my tongue as the psychiatrist interviews Mr Lemming in the psychiatric ED status post suicide attempt number one: the sole survivor of his cult’s alleged mass suicide. He notes Mr Lemming’s family history, asks about recurring feelings of sadness or emptiness, psychiatric medication. Whom he lives with. What he does for a living. How much he drinks….
Projectile Sounds
That year, I learned about the Doppler effect in physics class. What makes the noise of a speeding car seem a pitch lower after it’s sped by you. It was fall. My pimples were mostly gone but I was still fainting. I had not yet learned how to take the new refrigerator for granted–the choice…
Grief Triptych
In memory of Matt Kinnison Unnamed, unknown I am telling an unnamed, unknown someone, that I dreamt Ed was still alive. But I am telling the unnamed, unknown person this in a dream. Even as I sleep, I know that it’s complicated. I see Ed twisting in pain on the floor. Thin as a greyhound,…
Chairman Mao, in Retirement
To fill the day Chairman Mao goes on long walks. He buys a gold-tipped cane from a vendor stand, walks leaning heavily on it. He kicks at errant pieces of gravel, imagining the stones are the stars of the universe. He reads The Collected Works of Charles Dickens till he falls asleep in the study…
Maintenance
Rented one of those little one-bedroom apartments that make you wonder whether your luck will ever change. You know the type. Wake up the first morning and you’re lying in bed, running your fingernails across the wall. You do this every morning, thinking about what went wrong and whether your ex-boyfriend really loves you as…