Inspired by “Hans-My-Hedgehog,” a Brothers Grimm tale Nobody realized that Zhao Li was different until near the end of elementary school, when he started to look seriously weird. We were all the same cans of soup–and then he grew a layer of spines over almost his entire body. He still looked better than a lot…
Edward Scissorhands has taken up scrapbooking. He lives in Amagansett and meets, three times a week, with the six other ladies that form a scrapbook circle. After the city-folk have gone, the group meets at Lorraine’s house for tea and sometimes something stronger. This early fall day, the group sits on Lorraine’s porch as they…
Little old house, I drove past you. I angled past your pale blue paint, cracking from age and weathering from time. I drove past those windows – the ones I used to look out, stand in, glare at, think of, close the shutters, open the blinds, let the light in, close my eyes to the…
The boy was in charge of burying things. Now this had been determined well-before he was born, for the boy came from a group known as the Concealers, that revered class responsible for disposing of anything dead. Of course this wasn’t just the often bloated and sun-burned bodies clogging the curbs and alleyways of the…
We listened to Paul Simon, ate food from jars. Pickled things. We craved something sour. Our lives weren’t sour enough. We lived in Morristown in my grandparent’s old house down the street from Washington Headquarters. “George Washington stayed there once,” I told you. “He stayed everywhere,” you said. You drove to Paterson to buy the…
Ever wonder why grownups are so crabby? Crabby is the word my parents used because they couldn’t say “pissed off” in front of an eight year old. “Old enough to know what’s going on,” Daddy said when he swore in front of the Ferris wheel. Ferris wheel seats hold three people, but Daddy wanted to…
I was good at it, I want that known. Even if I was only called after all the nicer, neater neighborhood girls said no. Even though I made a dollar less than my lawn-mowing brother. (“Well, boys do work harder than girls. Everyone knows that,” he’d tell me.) I was loved—by children, pets, houseplants. I…
We couldn’t decide whether we wanted a baby or not, and I don’t like cats, and she hates dogs, and neither of us can stand hamsters, so we bought a plant. To keep alive. As a test, like one of those robot babies soon-to-be parents buy to know what to expect when expecting, except those…
I could be a werewolf. I could be, you don’t know that I’m not, you can’t prove it. I could be dangerous, secretly. I could be wild inside, fierce, deadly. You look at me with that contemptuous smirk while I’m here in Walmart dressed in sweats and house slippers, sloppy, a bit fat, trying to…
The shirtless boys on Snow Street have sharp sticks. They jut ‘em up as we walk by. “Wannan’ apple?” What they’re offering: Rot. Overripe, bad juice dribbling down dirty wood into dirty fists curled tight around the only things they know. Red as a beating heart, brown as earth, stuck on the tip of a…