Fiction

After I died, I found myself standing on a narrow stone bridge. In the middle of it was a woman cooking a pot of soup, and though she had a crooked back, had wrinkles deep as ravines crisscrossing on her face, her eyes were youthful—the whites were the palest shade of blue. Recalling the stories…

Cora holds the baby until Matt leans in and takes her back. She can smell the oily lank of his hair, the sweet of his breath. She’d suggested a hotel room—there must be something nearby, she said, but her daughter insisted she stay in the apartment with them. Families belong together, she said. Cora’s daughter…

Before, the space, the first floor of my apartment building that was rented out to business, had been an Escape the Room. Groups of friends booked and were trapped in adventure rooms, then given an hour to find a way out. The game was supposedly great for team-building, or so advertised the storefront posters, but…

There were two other Asian woman–white man couples at the animal shelter—two in addition to Sam and me, that is. They stood at the same windows, peering at the same dogs, and pressing their fingers on glass. They spent time in the kitten rooms like we had. I wondered if the kittens could tell the…

The first time I was called a nigger we were orbiting a planet of alien hostiles on a tactical base called Charity. Our last campaign had been successful—we’d mowed down our enemies, trampled their armored corpses, captured their flag. The carbine pulse rifle was a song bird in my hands. “Good game,” I said, scanning…

There are still bars—open and around, hallelujah. None of them serve food. Not since the Celestial Phenomenatic rains, flooding, ruin. Drinks only. But no garnish. No lemons, limes, olives, cherries. Garnish is extinct. Because, although it is neither filling nor delicious, it’s food. Nine&ahalf buys them two beers and a cup of coffee—black, no milk…

Now that Mama was sick it was just him and the old man running the house and things weren’t going too well. It wasn’t just that the dishes were unwashed and his clothes were always dirty; it was as if a dark fog had descended on them all ever since Mama had given birth to…

Dr. Burton was having a no-good, very bad day, and I was more than a little proud of my role in it. I watched from the eaves of her beamed kitchen as she burned her coffee and then her tongue, cussing a little, and then as her boys—all five of them—fought her requests, demands, and…

I’m not saying you were wrong in Sainte-Chapelle when you said what you said about third-class relics while our blind guide named a crown of thorns we couldn’t see because it wasn’t where he pointed or wasn’t there at all. You said veneration was not worship as the city darkened and I stepped in a…