I got to meet the cold thing living inside my dad that June I turned fifteen. I don’t know how long it’d been hiding in him. Maybe always. Or maybe he’d caught it, the way you catch a cold, that night he dove to the oyster beds. All I know is, on that blanched coral […]
The loser’s dead, the text read. How do you know? Asha sat down in her office chair. She’d been about to go across the street to buy her regular chicken wrap for lunch but her growling stomach could wait. There wasn’t any need for her to clarify the identity of the deceased. The only person […]
A new green mound of earth sits at the corner of 4th and Nicollet like a miniature oblong meadow. So bright against the gray expanse of the city. Ivory daisies bloom from it, begging the sun to slice through the smog. The Minneapolis Environmental Relocation Services have already arrived. A MERS worker wearing an offensively […]
Two days into Fosters’ Woods they found the skeleton. Ralph, Aaron’s pit bull, pulled it out of a tangled deadfall and rhododendron hell. The poor dog struggled, making groaning and scuffing noises, dragging his damaged hind legs through layers of leaf rot and dead tree debris. It was the densest stretch of vegetation they’d encountered […]
Steph doesn’t come into town much. When she does, she goes straight to the pub. Standing behind the bar, rubbing a thin towel on the inside of an empty schooner, Helen feels Steph before she sees her. Never been able to say what it is that makes her just know. She slips the phone out […]
On June 17, 2004, six students and two faculty members from Saint Ilia’s School for Gifted Girls were found dead. A not altogether shocking occurrence, as mishaps of the fatal variety often happen when one thousand powered teenagers are crammed under one roof, and with a fire conveniently destroying much of the school, there is […]
7 centimeters of my ring finger on my right hand. Sliced with a hot knife through gristle and tendon and bone, as though it were as soft as an ingot of butter. 2490 kiloliters of water had once ripped her and I from one another, had once sheathed her and I to one another. In […]
“What we care about you or your troublesome brother? You go up there, you don’t come back and we’ll be all the happier for it.” Not too long ago smart words like that would’ve been enough to set Marina off to fighting. Back then she’d been all too willing to gnash her teeth and get […]
Poon-Lai jabbed an elbow so her sisters would make more space. The others grumbled but pushed the dog-eared magazine back towards the middle. A British film star grinned at the camera, draped in a five-strand lustre necklace. Black in daylight, lustre shone brighter than opals in the darkness. The most precious gemstone in the world. […]
I watch from across the street as workers gut my high school; the building will be transformed into a brand-new suite of condos by the end of next year. They carry desks scratched with initials and barnacled with gum, blackboards grey with phantom equations and essay topics, and skinny lockers in puke orange and pale […]
