Fiction

She perfects her look on Myspace. The brightness and contrast in her photos are turned up to 70 percent so she looks like an animation most of the time. It’s the mid ’00s and she wears metallic cream eyeshadow, has red highlights in her layered hair, acrylics on her nails. Her belly button is pierced…

On our first date he brought me home to show his collection of bone records. He stood on a chair, pulled box after box from the top of a dusty wardrobe, talking about the music and how they approached doctors for old, discarded x-rays and then cut grooves into them using homemade lathes. I sat…

On the way to Bani Walid, a burned-out truck hulked in the middle of the road like the fossil of a tar-pit mastodon. It was a Libyan government ammunition carrier, incinerated by a coalition airstrike. The blackened ground glittered with broken glass, shrapnel and unexploded ordnance. Marwan skidded the car to a stop at the…

In the old Clatsop story, God pinched the mud of the north Oregon shore into mountains, carved rock to jagged crags. That’s how he cut his hands and his blood stained the flats of the north plains. Every autumn, as if remembering this event, the soil north and east of Astoria pushes forth blood-bright cranberries….

I started running into men, strangers, who looked like my brother. In the grocery store, at the bus stop. Fate warped the air like oil on water and then they’d appear at the edge of my vision, wearing the family nose. If I could get their attention, we’d talk. How are you? was how I…

1. Unless Henry was losing his mind, the laser printer at work had apparently attained some level of self-awareness. It must have happened during lunch Friday, because when he left his desk to grab a sandwich at the place downstairs, it was just a regular printer.   2. Specifically, it was an HP LaserJet Pro…

We left earlier than usual. The sun was barely peeking over the mountains. I was tired, but I didn’t make the schedule; SeaWorld made it, and the orcas made SeaWorld’s schedule. A couple months before, a buddy had told me SeaWorld was looking for orca hunters. It sounded cooler than it turned out to be,…

He lies clenched on his hard cot. The acrid smell of smoke bites. It’s been like this for weeks, covering everything. Fires starting all spring kicked up by the high winds. He tosses the sheet off. He’s got the suntan of a worker—pale torso, brown arms and legs. As he ages he gets furrier, his…

Snow Yu was not a bad mother; she was an overwhelmed mother. How could she not be overwhelmed by the size of her love for her daughter? It was a fierce and awesome thing. Unprecedented, as far as her own life was concerned. It seemed impossible that her heart had expanded as it had without…