Prose

1. Selfie What are you to do when you’ve spent most of your life primarily looking at one face, blemished, aging slowly but confidently, negotiating the trials (limited, one hopes) and tribulations, the glories of work, and love, and struggle, the visits to the farthest reaches of the world, the...

Platoon 3111's head Drill Instructor sat on a throne of foot-lockers in the middle of the squad bay. It was early in boot camp, before the days counted as Training Days, or T-Days. Recruits knew a lot could happen between T-Day 0 and graduation, but we still imagined every scenario...

You would only give me the toenail after I promised that I would not eat it. Plucked from your foot with tweezers, you lost the whole nail. It didn’t come off clean. Removed in painful shards, the nail bed beneath was revealed in such vulnerable pinkness that it felt obscene...

I’m scrubbing dishes in the orange evening when my phone throws a tantrum on the countertop. Here it is. Our president has finally launched the nukes. It’s time to shelter in bunkers we don’t have. Soapy water drips onto the screen before my unblurring eyes process the messages. The world...

Everett flicks a toggle, and the chain circling the thirty-two-inch bar jolts to a stop. Blue exhaust clears in favor of the syrupy scent of fresh-cut pine, its amber-black pitch everywhere: the saw, his used-to-be-white T-shirt, his jeans, yellow work boots, yellow work gloves, inside his forearms. Everett rests the...

It was the cheapest motel on the beltway. Dakota knew it was a crapshoot how large a dent his mother had made into the amount owed on his sole credit card. He’d nearly shit himself when the tired old man behind the front desk told him the room’s cost. Couldn’t...

HARLOW POSTCARD 1 CENT Amulet Harlow & the Fertility Rite “Not only was Bello still jobless, but his newfound status as a movie star’s stepfather had increased his infidelities. Enraged and disgusted, Mother Jean contacted a lawyer in secret until Bello discovered her scheme and threatened to sell pornographic photos...

Mimi. Or Miriam, as you’re always correcting me. I thought you’d at least come down here yourself. Instead you hired some white woman from an agency. You arranged for my abduction. Casually, remotely. Trish Hopkins from a place called Flanders Meadows. And all I can picture when she says this...

He once caught Nana singing in a language whose words seemed all one seamless word. She was singing to her paintings, portraits of faces he’d never known and could only ask whose bodies they belonged to. “Me,” Nana said. “These are my faces, all of them.” Yet he couldn’t understand...

The boy, Billy, was the husband. He pinched an imaginary tie knot between his fingers, straightened it in front of an imaginary mirror, then ran his hand over his blond curls in an attempt to mat them into a neat, business-like part. He picked up a lunch box of Legos...