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  • La Desaparecida

    This time the bombs came in the middle of Sunday mass. Leila heard the planes first, screaming from above. Then the first blast shook the entire church, pulled the walls and wooden pews and windows and ceramic-tiled roof off the building and turned them into a rain of fire and ash. Leila didn’t have time…

  • Fat

    The first couple of pounds were hard and I cried a lot; I wasn’t used to so little food. I had signed up at one of those clinics, spent a lot of money on diet soup, and got weighed in front of a bunch of other fat people so when I wanted to eat a…

  • Arlene in Five

    1.   When the brindled cow was five, she got an infected eye. Arlene took her to the vet in Armstead to have the eye examined, perhaps removed. The brindled cow wasn’t worth the vet bill, but she was a pet of sorts. Arlene loaded the cow into the horse trailer, delivered her to the…

  • Priapus

    I am the only man in the world because I have no tits. I have a permanent hard-on as long as I am tall and it outweighs me.                                   They say that I have horns, hooves, and a tail, but this is a myth or a lie: my forehead is knobbed, my coccyx is protuberant, and…

  • Dancing in Buses

    Pretend a boom box blasts over your shoulder. Raise your hands in the air. Twist them as if picking mangoes. Look to the right as if crossing streets. Look to the left, slowly as if balancing orange baskets. Bend as if picking cotton. Do the rump. Straighten up as if dropping firewood. Rake, do the…

  • Pretty

    If Trudy had scooped the keys from Karl’s hand, if she had trilled, “How about I drive this time,” or if she had snapped, “You’ve got no business behind the wheel, you should know that by now,” they would have been stopped at that light, Trudy fiddling with the vents as the mist crept up…

  • My Happiness

    You wander into my thought, my happiness, the way the deer wander through the yard these days, very relaxed, with no thought of being hunted, browsing the bushes near the driveway like people at the refreshment table of an art opening… That’s how you come over me— not with a burst of wings, but with…

  • The Great Dream: A Plan B Essay

      In the Plan B essay series, writers discuss their contingency plans, extraliterary passions, and the roads not traveled.   For my family, Plan B wasn’t the fallback plan for when life went awry. Life was already awry, and they’d already seen their hopes and ambitions compromised. So Plan B—what they would do if they…