Martha, the nurse wakes me up at the crack of dawn. She helps me to the bathroom. She’s holding the IV and I’m dragging the two cheese sticks I’ve got for legs. Every step feels like it’s going to be… Continue Reading
The butterflies were in Anna’s head, not in her stomach — a swarm of glorious, golden images she couldn’t seem to suppress, even when she told herself to count sheep, or recite nonsense rhymes, to try and lull herself to… Continue Reading
You were there when I was installed. On a boat, one hundred miles from any coastline, you pushed me into the slot and started the installation sequence. The first thing I was aware of is that I was not meant… Continue Reading
I arrived at the hotel bar just as things were picking up, slid onto a barstool and swiveled to peek up at the big guy next to me. Well, I tried to, anyway, but looking up through my new mink… Continue Reading
I want to swim in the ocean with her. But I can’t. She’s sitting in my lap scrolling through the images of her mother and me. The computer screen is a useless time machine that can’t change the past. The… Continue Reading
I was heading south. Vegas, to be exact. Five hundred hard-earned dollars were burning a hole in my pocket. That cheap-ass O’Reilly had finally coughed up what he owed for the two weeks I’d spent busing crates around in his… Continue Reading
This blanket would be unmemorable except you recognize this as your favorite pattern and remember where, still new to knitting needles, you used to drop stitches and clumsily fix them up. Your fingertips know this sturdy, not-soft yarn without touching… Continue Reading
(London, Highgate psychiatric ward, 1995.) Rosa chokes on a wall of smoke as she enters the TV room. Through the jaundiced haze she makes out 8 or 9 men in plastic chairs, staring fixedly at a screen. Persil Automatic gets… Continue Reading
OFFICIAL 9-1-1 TRANSCRIPT: OCTOBER 08, 1984 Dispatcher: 9-1-1. What’s your emergency? Caller: Lord… help… you gotta help. Dispatcher: Sir, please calm down. I need — Caller: She’s… I don’t know what. She was… she was down there. I put her… Continue Reading
My grandmother’s hands are pale with slender fingers and arthritic joints that never stopped her from doing whatever she wanted despite some occasional pain and swelling. They looked exactly as I pictured mine would, in another fifty years or so,… Continue Reading