I hold the things I need in my arms. Since the pandemic, I don’t use a basket. Today, I’m cradling a bottle of Advil gel caps, blue mascara, and a ginger lemon kombucha. Customer service associate needed in the…
Trula be gone, selfish-flown some say or eyeing a new man. I say, Tru chugged by her own factory steam—didn’t one of us help or remind her of the mold blooming up the sides of her curtainless house—that Judson…
The first thing they had to do was name us, as if we were rescues or strays. As if they would need a way to gossip about us, to get our attention. We mostly did not like our new…
/fjuːɡ/ noun A piece of music popularized during the Baroque period in which a primary melody, or subject, is introduced by one voice, then systematically passed to and developed between others in a polyphonic, intertwined texture. 1. Subject…
“I like your look,” you say, cradling your laptop, maneuvering past the jutting armrests to sit next to me. “Thanks.” I put a limp bundle of shoestring fries into my mouth. The armrests, you explain, are to keep people…
Sometimes Mrs. Bowman rode the school bus to her jobs. She’d be waiting on the road with her children—her daughter, Suzette, and son, Buddy—both of whom I knew to be in High Levels of reading and math, as were…
On the settee, and smoking, Susan Dunn watches out the glass door to the yard, where one squirrel rapes another. She feels no need to stop it, hasn’t creased a brow or pursed a lip, and goes on smoking…
I go to churches because they’re quiet. The world is too loud. The first time I went, I was hiding. I’d been paying for a flat white at the café near my old office when my ex-fiancé and his…
Over the phone, I urge my sister to recount the event of the morning, several years ago when we were kids and our mother was away in nursing school, that she, being the eldest, woke up early as usual…
It was raining that day, and when Daisy came home early from work she found me not only in the sundress I’d bought in secret from the underground market at Sadang Station, but in her bra and a pair…
