“If the duck was a song bird, it would sound like this: nasal, desolate, the call of migratory things.” – Mr. Lies to Harper Pitt, Perestroika IV, Angels in America My sister Agatha Krishna said it started when they came, and that’s where you could put the blame. She said we had to go back….
Hardly anything was out of the ordinary when Esther first arrived. Not that time was in any hurry to slow down out here. Things were in their fairly expected state for this time of year—even if, though the calendar read October, the burner had been high underneath the day since before she’d left Chattanooga. By…
She caught a glimpse of her eyes on the screen and felt they held the fact that she’d finally found the very thing the internet had been invented for, like she had arrived, and this was it. But it wasn’t; it was just that her eyes were wide from losing focus and watery from wear….
Evenings I meet Angelo in the parking lot behind Whataburger to get high. This has become such a ritual that we don’t even talk about it anymore. We just meet up in the same spot right behind the dumpster, a small patch of creosote bushes that shield us from any onlookers. It used to be…
Diana forgets the second half of her line as Emily Webb, distracted by the puffy sleeves of her costume, an otherwise unobjectionable 1930s “day dress” printed with tiny blue roses and belted at the waist. She swats at one bloated shoulder, wishing she could find the gravestone of the genius who came up with this…
Whenever Susan Bridge heard friends or family talk of inklings from the other side, or of being watched over by a lost loved one, she inwardly dismissed the idea even as she strove to be loving and attentive in the circumstance. She felt sorry, of course, but considered that in each case, bereavement was dictating…
Jamie was in trouble again. That’s what I first recalled of events leading up to the Breadshow. It was a Wednesday—one of Mrs. Riordan’s teaching days—so I had to go down to the elementary school on her behalf. While she was showing housewives how to beat eggs or pan fry a steak, I was dealing…
A mother works on you slowly. When she called me the first time from the ER, I bought it. She’d never been before, not that I could remember. Later, my mother reminded me of when I was in high school, and she’d broken her wrist. She had been climbing garden walls again that year. My…
When we lived above the laundromat, Eliana and me, we used to have a movie night almost every Tuesday night. This was before the days of streaming video, back when everything we watched was on VHS and DVD, back when everything felt simpler, purer. Back in those days, we used to rent our movies from…
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