My ex-boyfriend owns a pub called The Rascally Rabbit, and every time I go there he tries to convince me to fuck him. I say, “I’m married.” He says, “Me too. And?” I say, “And, your wife’s a bitch.” This is true, though Shannon and I were good friends before she married my ex-boyfriend. Well,…
You reach a certain age, you have to level with yourself. There are things I can’t do that I thought I could do, there are lies I tell myself everyday that I probably should stop telling myself. I’m no longer young, I’m on the backend of an uneventful, relatively easy life, and I think it’s…
She was done with it. Curving at age ten; aching ever since. Always demanding a great delicacy of movement–no running, no jumping, no dancing. Intimacy was a controlled handshake. She’d had enough, so out it went, into the trash. As it turns out, the ribs had to go too (anatomy!). Fortunately, Esther had had the…
I folded myself into a cup to hold in those feelings. They seeped through forming dark patches on the outside. So I unfurled myself and started again. Eight times over I turned in on myself. Rigid and plain, I sat alone. You glided close to me, an aeroplane from afar. Then you reformed into a…
We had grown bored with our bodies: those tedious slouching abdomens, those same rubbery slopes of flesh. But then we discovered that there were additional, submerged bodies underneath, or, more precisely, body parts that lived under our other body parts and sometimes floated up, shyly, just beneath the surface. Like the rippling movement of a…
I don’t know the rules. All I know is this: I wait until the cicadas start screaming, shedding skins that cling to tree trunks. I wait until the humidity is so thick I can cut it with a butter knife. And then I ride my bike to the old house where I grew up. And…
When you’re a 2L, they’ll take you aside after registration day, and they’ll sit you down—we were in the aquatic-smelling student lounge, with Professor Stahlberg presiding, pizza sauce on his tie and his glasses riding down his nose—and they’ll tell you about post-mortem law, “post-mort tort,” Stahlberg says, dryly amused. You, already used to jokes…
No later than last night On the quiet surface of our lake Something appeared, as though pushed gently from the depths by a pale, plump hand of soft skin, fingers nimble, wading through algae and schools of fish And the people in their neat little beds in the neat little houses peppered around the water…
The screaming started about a month before the sky burst into flames. Her voice came out full, fevered, shrieking in response to seemingly nothing. Betsy and Robert first marveled at the sound of it. Even as a baby, wrapped in a singular blanket alone in Woodland Park, the officers heard no protest or complaint as…
I’m about to burst like a frozen pipe. I’m not cold though, I am burning with heat and sweating buckets. The gases inside me fuel the pilot light and keeps the system functioning. My body is excruciating and wet; existing is dangerous. It’s never been this bad, not even the leukemia in middle school. I…