What I saw and how I saw it: As if through a cracked piece of sea-glass, worn to kaleidoscope etching, all lights forming haloes and all darknesses eddying like some fungal sea. Through dry and bleeding eyes. At a distance, through the mind’s dirty windshield. In shreds and patches, drips and drabs, bits and snatches. […]
“Awa, did you see this?” My sister is holding out her phone for me to read. There are streaks of brown henna, which she has been trying to apply in preparation for a friend’s wedding, on the cracked screen. Kana refused my help, saying my hands were too clumsy for the intricate, precise patterns she […]
Trauma is a ghost that haunts you. Grief another. Dad was dead. Mom gripped in a pall of anguish. And Sophie wouldn’t shut up. “Ophelia,” Sophie was saying, “we all perish in the end. Sometimes our end comes sooner than we’d like.” I stared at her. It was night. We were on the backyard patio. […]
This month, the dead bird on her front step was accompanied by a tooth. Renata gazed at tooth and bird both for long enough to miss her bus, then went inside to get a dustpan and brush. Paul was there when she returned, crouched over the dead bird. “Neighborhood cat’s back,” he said. “Thought we’d […]
He was on the way up, the poor lad. Up from an infancy of neglect, out of the fistfights of his adolescence, the mind-addled haze of his twenties. Now, early thirties, he was peeling away from that self-sabotaging behavior, proudly clean of booze, weed, fast food. He was working out. He was healthy. He had, […]
It was hard to miss the large wooden O mounted by the door of the bungalow. O as in obedient, onerous, obscene. The stain along the bottom of the letter conjured an image of ragged teeth and a tongue. Gray and black rotting leaves filled one side of the porch. The window screens were rusted […]
I’ve always loved the sea; the caress of waves, the scrunch of sand, the weightlessness in the water. Even as a little girl I’d tell all my secrets to it—my problems, my worries— whispering them into the blue where they’d disappear. Today, I walk barefoot, holding my jandals in one hand as the tide rubs […]
He looks out of the caravan window. Filthy night. The hour is late; freezing cold bed sheets make sleep impossible. A relentless, suffocating winter and the weight of the snow draws the world down around him. Three sugars, he thinks. He strikes a match and lights the little gas stove to make his cup of […]
Anna stood at the edge of the dock, watching the lake’s calm mirror, the water serene, untouched. Something in her refused to settle. The last time she and Milo were here, they’d fought. A slow-burn kind of fight, the kind where every word had its own hidden blade. She’d accused him of trying to control […]
Moonshine City still had that new building stink. Aya stared at the white lines in the parking lot as rain dotted the asphalt. These lines were the only traces left of MAPITA Mall, that charmingly run-down shopping center that had stood here for two decades before. Aya could practically hear the crackling carnival tune of […]
