They let us use the community center to talk about books. It made sense. What I was doing, it was pretty much community service. Not the kind mandated by a judge. This was more self-imposed. Eight months ago, not drunk or in a rush or driving through the rain, I’d skipped through a stop sign […]
It begins with a girl in the water. My stilt-legged home rises from a dark, slow-moving river; in it, I learnt to swim, buoyed by coconuts. For much of my nineteen years its murky depths held no fear. In the water there’s fish, in the fields there’s rice. In the kingdom of Ayutthaya, none of […]
No plant can thrive without putting down roots, as nothing comes from nothing; what you feed your garden with matters, always, be it the mulched remains of other plants, or bone, or blood. The seed falls wherever it’s dropped and grows, impossible to track, let alone control. There’s no help for it. These are all […]
Here’s the stepmother watching them through a crack in the barn wall. Her eyes are wide. She’s dizzy still, from that moment ago when the prince stepped into her courtyard requesting water for his retinue, a carriage wheel having snapped just there on the road before this good burgher’s house, but she’s conniving too and […]
Sometimes when he sketched out what he remembered of that place, new revelations appeared in the shading, or displayed between the layering of a series of lines, or implied in a shape suggested in some darker spot in the drawing. The back of her head, or some bit of her face, dead or merely sleeping […]
It’s been raining for two weeks now. Shiny, stabby rain, so that when Momma gets me and Benjamin out of the car we have to run for it so our skin doesn’t get all red and blotchy. At first, she laughed when we came inside, and her hair glimmered like a fairy’s. I knew mine […]
They picked up Howard from the bus stop in town, early in the morning of his first day. “Bit of a change for you, then, off to work with the rest of ’em?” said the driver, a thickset shaven-headed man in his fifties. His voice was incongruously mild and affable; it took Howard a while […]
1. Sperm whale tooth, lampblack The first scene depicted is the whaling ship Henry Charles Morgan, beset by a storm. The waves are stylized curls, the wind traced as spirals battering the masts and tearing the sails. A series of dots arranged diagonally across the image stand in for rain. The lampblack is worked most […]
The air in the shop smelled of talcum, resin, and tissue, with a faint, almost indefinable undertone of pine and acid-free paper. I walked down the rows of collectible Barbies and pre-assembled ball-jointed dolls to the back wall, where the supplies for the serious hobbyists were kept. Pale, naked bodies hung on hooks, while unpainted […]
Of the first six postcards from Natalie, I only have three. Mom was able to intercept the other three while I was at school or, after June, working a shift at the Tractor Supply Store. I wouldn’t even have known about them except that she made sure I knew, saved them until I got home […]
