Fiction

1 So this your real, ehm, body? The real you? No silicone for Ms. Velvet Lace? I say it’s really me, of course. I say it pleasant as can be, like I’m still working the register at Key Food, even though these men don’t look like nobody I know or want to know. It’s two…

Hannah didn’t realize her father was a person who needed to be married, like a philopatric sea animal, until after the divorce. “He’s a nurse shark,” her mother explained. “No matter what, they always go back to the Dry Tortugas.” Hannah didn’t know what her mother meant, but she suspected her father now preferred his…

Ema used to say our village sat on a “butte” of possibility—on hilly land, though not an isolated hill, swollen with water and limestone. He was our self-appointed geography expert. At least he was effusive about things—such as our distance from the Atlantic Ocean, how our rubber trees and mahogany were disappearing—until his father’s death….

Every winter, Mrs. Botho Kennekae’s husband took time off from his driving job in the city and spent three weeks at the cattlepost, where he did whatever men did there—presumably offer the softness they withheld from everyone to their cattle, for the cattle were the great loves of their lives: so beloved the men called…

I wriggle my tights up my legs, feel them squeeze at my thighs and bite at my waist. They’re a size too small but my sole pair without a run. My whole body feels sour, all tight and tucked into Capezio. I’d much rather be wearing the loose pants and draping tops of my New…

When my mother’s urinary tract infection slips into her blood, she calls and asks me to come home to help with Haley’s baby. “What about the father?” I say. “Can’t he take it?” “He’s indisposed.” “What about the father’s parents?” “What are you doing that’s so important?” she says. “Begging?” My sister died a few…

Daniel’s mother was only fifteen years older than him, and a few weeks after he was born, she turned into a salamander and padded away on stealthy, gummy feet. That’s what Nan told him, anyway. Each spring, he’d watch the salamanders pour over the road in front of the house on their way to the…

The Lawrences were so scared of their father that none of them screamed when he parked their Volvo on the track between Kidlington and Yarnton. He drove like an idiot—everyone knew that. He was so cruel when any of the children dared cry out at a bend taken too fast that they sat stoic and…

I forget, for a moment, that I am not home. The dormitory is still dark, very dark, but I can see small particles of light stealing into the window gauze. It deceives me for a brief moment because that is exactly how Mma’s house is: the windows have tiny-tiny squares, and sometimes in the morning,…