Prose

I am a bad mother. I’ll be the first to admit it. Take Little League games. Can’t stand them. All these blonde sorority moms, pushy or prissy or both, and black-haired, tattooed me, cheering on our little darlings. Please. I wouldn’t even be here if Mom hadn’t signed Noah up...

You rip up the old beige carpet, matted down with fifty years of footsteps. Dust whirls up: bantam bits of grandparents and babies and pets and dinosaurs and rocks from space. The history of the universe and yesterday’s Chihuahua dandruff are equal here, spinning gold in the light from the...

Our house on Austin Road had red bricks and green shutters. It was a ranch-style house, with just one floor and the longest hallway in the world. The hallway began in the living room: cozy red couches, framed family portrait of the four of us dressed in matching blue jeans...

According to the Laws of Thermodynamics, the sum of the world’s entropies creates a central zero. If I position my feet just right, heels pressed against bags of dog and cat food, my ten-year-old body fits inside the kitchen pantry. I stand silent, watch through the dark brown wooden slats,...

Every memory has an agenda to either comfort us or settle scores. We post pictures of ourselves when we were young to remind people that we were once desirable. In nursing homes, residents tape up photos of themselves in their combat fatigues or wedding gowns, slim and young. Maybe they...

Q: Why’d you do it? A: My aunt was mad as a hatter, always trying to give us hats despite our assurances as to the impracticality of such an arrangement. We would say “Aunt Susan, we have so many hats already!” We would say “our closets are already so full...

How to Survive the Apocalypse – A Triptych Learn where the fish run and when. Pay attention to birds. Go running every day. Lift weights until you’re strong enough to lift your own body. Sit up, push up, pull up. Eat healthy. Get plenty of protein. Practice blowjobs, practice hand...

"Forgive me; I’m thirteen,” she said to me. “No, you’re not,” I told my mother. But that was back then. Back when I was thirteen and she was forty-three. I still remember feeling the summer bees’ wind beat around my head and ears. And seeing the winter’s water churn the...

The things we no longer need can be disposed of in a few ways. I see this in my family. Often they’re burned— in a bonfire, or rusted oil-barrel in Red’s yard. Some of the older relatives stand around it, the rural version of a water-cooler. They look out across...

You once told me about your kneeling parents—both of them groveling, hands cupped in front of their hearts as if receiving alms—though later, as I came to know, my memory of your story was wrong: reworked from the stuff of my own recollections. These two figures were, in fact, my...