Fiction

Exiled from yourself, you fuse with everything you meet. You imitate whatever comes close. You become whatever touches you. –Luce Irigaray,This Sex Which Is Not One At night I sleep without movement in the suburbs of a Phoenix desert, having dreams of hot plants in the Andes, dreams filled with parents as they talk to…

The waiter called me over from my table with a wave. It was a wave first with his hand, but then with his eyebrow and his smile, and with a nod of his head to be sure. He called me over more with these than with his hand, and so I got up. In an…

Bad Ways On the Flathead Reservation you can come to a spot in the road where the wind smells like sulfur, a dark smell, something you think you should be able to leave behind you, but it will be in your clothing and in your shoes. And there will be a darkness in the way…

John-John had been saving dollar bills toward a dream and when he had a shoebox full of bills he sat down to count out his future. “One, two, three,” he counted, all the way up to ten to make a neat stack on the floor and soon, he had two hundred neat stacks in exact…

The house was a forest remembering itself. The pine trees that held up the walls dreamed of stars dwelling in their needles. Jointed, branched, rooted, the trees still listened to the wind. The oak floors gleamed from the generations of human oils, but they still grew into their immense lineage of light and matter. The…

Now it happened in the twelfth month that James and Crowbar visited Renah, James’s sister. They were there to never lift a hand. Just their fork expecting something on it. The two men drove from Nail, Arkansas, along Highway 16 to Red Star, where Renah had her cabin nearly built into the hills. Her goats…

How many nurses cared for her needs? The first dressed Bea’s wound, a puckered red mouth silenced with staples. A second nurse brought her a cup of chilled juice to wash away the sour taste in her mouth. A third nurse, a man, massaged her sore back. Then a fourth nurse came in, a small,…

There are no albums of family photographs in our house. Before he left last Sunday night, Gort must have carried them all out the front door and piled them at the curb for the garbage men. The black marbled copybooks full of nature notes must have gone the same way; when I broke into the…

The last deportations from the town in Poland where my father had been born, and where his parents lived, were carried out in October 1942. The town was declared Judenrein. This word was written in the center of the green ruled page that my father found when he returned to Poland after the war. It…