Fiction

  • The Mexican Detective

    My sister’s body was found twelve days after her birthday, which was the last time I’d seen her. The silence of the interval was nothing extraordinary; we didn’t have reason to speak, and the older we got, the more reason we needed. Our family, like any other, had a certain tension built into it. Falling-outs…

  • The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs

    Cañon City was not a city. It was a small, gossiping, high-security town in Colorado’s high desert, bordered to the west by the Sawatch Range. A home rule municipality boasting thirteen prisons and fifty churches, its ten thousand people—one fifth of them locked up—governed themselves as they saw fit and thrived on the stories, true…

  • Tapetum Lucidum

    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…

  • King of the Hill

    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…

  • The Terrarium

    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…

  • Sweetpea

    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…

  • The Thing About Relics

    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…