fiction

Steven stands outside his engagement party at his future in-laws’ beach house, headphones jammed in his ears, smoking a joint to calm himself before going back inside.

To the sailors in the bleachers, the stain inching from Angelo Poffo’s flanks resembled a pair of dark, sticky wings. The rhythm, the friction, had husked the skin off his lower back. By the third hour, eight fingers laced under his head had fused together. A medic offstage twirled a scalpel in the flame of a Navy-issued Zippo.

At the team’s first practice, the new coach says, “Can I see you in my office?”

“I don’t know,” Amber says. “Can you?”

He has a room waiting for them at the Red Carpet Inn under a fake name. At the front desk, she will tell them she’s his daughter, there to pick up the room key her dad has left for her.

My cousin Stephanie, only four months older than me but always the first to do everything, has a boyfriend. This boyfriend lives in a neighborhood so lush and green that when they walk the sidewalks at night, the two of them passing a cigarette back and forth (she’s the first to smoke too), she imagines they are lightning bugs in a forest.

He said it was to absorb my power. The way they talk about cannibals in the movies. He said it was because he had a hole inside him that he stuffed and stuffed, but could never fill. I told him we all have holes and he said he knew it and it didn’t matter what I thought as he started with a toe, which I thought was unwise.

A fortune-teller told me I had drowned myself in a previous life in Ancient China. Apparently my parents had arranged for me to marry a rich but old government official and, in absolute protest, my past self found a fast-moving river and jumped in, defiantly thinking Don’t you tell me what to do as I succumbed to the cold torrents.

Whenever my mother had a migraine, she had us write a list of things we were afraid of on yellow legal pads. When we finished we pushed them under her locked bedroom door. My younger sister, Lesley (she had me call her Lola), who acted like my older sister, could crank out a list in sixty seconds flat. I cheated off her list sometimes.

My father was a bell maker. Bells of all sizes crowded his workspace, rows of molded crowns. Curved shoulders ranged across oiled parchment. The yokes, scrolled oak or simpler design, were fitted to the bell bodies, sonorous clappers tested repeatedly for the best sound.

I am eleven turning twelve and I’m convinced Patti Smith is my mother and secretly lives in my neighborhood. I live in a town called Smithtown. This is only part of the reason I think Patti lives here.

“Passing” was the verb we employed to describe the act of traveling to the other side. Passing was a thrill, a gorgeous kind of terror held within tight bounds. Permission to look at another world, one frightful and uncharted, all the while tethered safely to our own by seat belts and vigilant adults anchored to steering wheels.

It wasn’t Alicia’s catechism teacher, her mother, or even her sister who taught Alicia the truth about God’s grace and the redemptive power of skin robes. It was her stepfather, Larry McBride.

When I was young and gawky I rode a bicycle everywhere I went and defaulted to happiness. In spite of midnight beatings for breaking my glasses, the threat of nuclear war, and revelations about the specter of a silent spring, my disposition remained relentlessly sunny.

There’s an animal outside my window. It’s looking at me. I was just doing nothing here at the kitchen table, scrolling through shit on my phone, trying to beat this insomnia, crying again for some unknown reason, and then HEY!

On her first day of her new job a man wearing a kilt and smoking a cigarette showed Isobel Bennett to her cubicle. She briefly fantasized she was being recruited by the C.I.A., but it was probably some sort of not-for-profit. She didn’t care what they did as long as it wasn’t a scam.

No one does what he does. No one does what he does where he does it or within the sound of his shouting voice. No one does for anyone what he does for everyone who wants him to do it. No one.

Emmeline felt it finally, that wonderful expansion that came with a couple drinks. The spaces between her words. The width of her smile. She felt it all, along with the gaze of the man on the other side of the yard, looking down his beer bottle at her as he drank.

Life was better before I could Speak with Dead. When I could only Cure Light Wounds once, twice a day? Those were the best times. Little miracles. That’s where it’s at.

Anaza dies on June 2nd. But on that day, he will walk into Aunty Orahachi’s bar and buy drinks for young men who are tired of looking for white collar jobs, who cut grass in homes where all the virile adult men have gone off to big cities…

There are some of you, and you know who you are, who will never set foot inside a robot whorehouse. There are some of you, and I won’t name names, who have decided that places like At Your Leisure, no, they’re just not for you.

Burns pauses, lets the sock drop onto his loafer, and lays down on the bed. He can hear Sarah in the bathroom, the shower shutting off and the water pick starting up.

You told me I was crazy —yes, you did; don’t you remember when we were traveling through North Thailand on the sleeper; I could hear you rolling over on the bottom bunk — “Listen,” you said, “I think you might need help” — and I couldn’t even respond; I was so mad

It was fall and my brother Aaron was in an Elvis phase. Every Saturday he would wake our sister Jeanie up and she would kneel in front of him on the bed and slick his hair back with Vaseline and paint sideburns down to his chin with magic marker.

It was out along Cold River Road where I first encountered that owl. I’d finished up my shift at Green Mountain Power and it was getting dark–was getting darker, in fact, earlier each day that time of year…

He’s tall, the tallest guy I’ve ever been with, structured face, stubble on his chin, runner’s build, practices yoga.

He balances a blanket under his arm, a bottle of white wine and two glasses, and nods at the large plate he set for us, filled with cheeses and meats and crackers and olives and all of these things I see in restaurants but never actually order…

10-Piece 2.25"-10.25" Glass Nesting Bowl Set / “Nesting set of 10 includes a size for every task.”

There’s something infinitely pleasing about nesting bowls, how they fit into each other like round, glass Matryoshka dolls.

In the four months since production had been indefinitely halted, the airship Ishtar’s naked keel had taken on the skeletal aspect of a beached and rarefying whale.

Tonight, neither of us are in our own bodies. In fact, no one here will ever be. But everyone still likes to talk about how unnerving it is to be outside themselves, to adjust to their new bodily possessions over tentative sips of cheap red wine.

Sow seeds outdoors, as soon as soil can be worked in spring, at depth of ½ inch.

When Maisie was born, Daniel wasn’t there. There were no stories about her birth that included him.

When Hammond was very young, he had a hard time sleeping. It felt as though there were millions of tiny things crawling around beneath his skin, and the small, small spaces that separated each of these tiny things was known to him, and so it wasn’t just that there were millions of them, but that he never felt whole, and that he felt always on the brink of dissolving.

Dolly thought she smelled the sea. No. It was him. She hated his sexiness.

Your mother is sending you to the underworld. You can only bring one item with you. Which do you choose?

After the dog died in January, Bob's typical mopiness turned to nostalgia for his childhood house. It had been a long winter with a lot of cold and not much snow.

Why does anyone care what I eat? He asked her. Everyone cares she said

There was a brown spot on the wall. It looked a little raised, but that could’ve been an illusion created by the combination of the color and the wall’s texturing.

Ellen started baking in the afternoon and did not stop until around midnight, (after the soufflé had fallen, after the tea kettle cried, after she remembered, suddenly, what she had been trying all day to forget), she was tireless

Vic noticed a long-haul configuration dead-stopped a few tracks removed, both doors on both sides of its baggage car open such that he could see clean through, policemen on the near side lowering guns they had just pointed into the cavity of the railcar.

I kissed someone for the first time last night. It wasn’t the first time I kissed anyone but it was the first time I kissed this person. He’s about to be famous—or already is, a little.

He hates guns, so I buy a gun. I hate guns, so I buy a gun. Here I am, sauntering up to the glass case of a sporting goods store.

Maiden Estep leads the Red Hat into Number Six at Bear Town, where the mine starts. They walk at first, back to the crawl, miles deep inside, under the town of Grundy. Already, they have cut a strip in both directions, and soon they’ll be coming back through the middle, robbing pillars it’s called, the most danger any of them have been exposed to except the old guys, the robbing line and the dynamite guys.

Cecilia Cherry picked her nose. She picked it until it bled, and then she’d scrape at the scabs until it bled some more.

Martin Behaim wakes in the humid belly of his own caravel, naked and bound at the limbs. It’s dark as death and twice as cold.

Right here, right now. A gentle surf. The clouds retreating. Careful on the wet rocks. A man with an aluminum walking-stick ponders an emerald tide pool.

In July 1804 David Hosack knelt unsteady in the bottom of a rowboat bound back to Manhattan and soaked the knees of his breeches in Alexander Hamilton’s blood. Hosack straddled Hamilton like a field surgeon, like a lover.

On a night like this, on top of the world (which is for the moment the roof outside your latest lover's window, the one with the teeth) you remember something you were told by someone whose face you can’t remember but whose birthday was the same as yours.

Janet 1 and Janet 2 shared all the same words. It sounded ridiculous, Oliver knew, but it was as if one Janet spoke to him in anagrams of arguments he’d had with the other.

When I tell people I’m from Spencer, Iowa, I don’t expect them to automatically know that my hometown was ranked the 10th Best Place to Live in the United States by Relocate-America.com’s “America's Top 100 Places to Live for 2007.”

When I came to I was lying flat on my back, the waves licking my naked ankles, my hair a mess of slime and seaweed. Placenta coated my pale blue arms, fingers swollen and nails encased in grime.

July 31, 2013 | Memphis, TN

Chris,
Yesterday I bought a new pair of shoes like you told me. I bought a six-pack of Bud & a bag of Fritos.

That’s Pringreen. There—that mantis of a man propped on the corner with his hand in his pocket, fondling something. A dent in the top of his stovepipe hat as if someone put it there with a single outraged blow.

In a Soho bistro, a young couple sit in the wan London sun. He is drinking a cappuccino and looking forlorn. She is eating a cheese and tomato sandwich and falling in love with the thinly sliced tomato as it caresses her tongue.

Dear Mr. Buckneffer,
I am writing to let you know that a petition has been circulated in regards to adding another member to our diverse intellectual team here at Distinct Designs, Inc. I am the one who started this petition.

We found out that our computer ran on magic. Mom and Dad had said it was supposed to be electricity that computers ran on, before we’d bought it and brought it home. But that day the computer started running before we could plug it in.

I met Peter online. I mean, he sent me an email, and from that moment I knew I had to help him. It was such a touching story. About how he couldn't trust his family. About the car crash that killed his wife and kids. The esophageal cancer. It wasn't just about the money.

There was a time when everything I owned fit precisely into a Volkswagen Rabbit. It took some thought—laundry bags instead of baskets, one good purse, versatile shoes. And closing the hatchback required a few attempts with some rearranging in between.

Those in the cathedral district knew Azul DePerila as the transient who called himself a bishop, a man who wandered the neighborhood at all hours. On Wednesday night of Holy Week, he was outside Christ the King as the moon shone between twin spires, covering the memorial garden in a band of light.

When Teenie lumbered into view with the baby carrier on her chest, I had to stop myself from bawling. I didn’t really believe there was a baby in there—we had only started “trying” last month—but the sight of that half-price Butterball turkey bulging from the sling was almost enough to get me going. These days, it didn’t take much.

Each day the black eye was duller. I thought it was clouds but with the next sun the globe was more gray, as if dusted with sand, staring past me toward the sky. On the third morning as I went my path the bees parted her lashes to drink from the eye, as if to sting her back to sight.

Soon as I get home from my shift at Marketplace Solutions, Ryan’s all over me about the MOOC. He refuses to go ahead on his own because the MOOC is something he wants to do as a team on account of eventually we want to be business partners, so his thinking is that by taking the course together we’re not only learning Entrepreneurship 101 or whatever, we’re also learning about each other…

Megan Jeffries moved past the smokers and angled her body away as if they reached for her hands. When offered help, she shook her head no thank you. Using the left side of her body, she shoulder-pushed through the revolving door, clutching the cupcakes to her chest, and rode the elevator to the ninth floor. Her sweating only got worse in the air conditioning.

I was eight when my parents started leaving me home alone. As a CPA, my father handled the financial operations for the municipality of Hialeah Gardens. He and my mother often went to dinner parties with the chief of police, his lackeys, the mayor, and his lackeys.

She has a harelip and we only have hate sex.

It’s winter and everything is desperate. We sit on the side porch and listen to a fisher cat tear into a fox pup.

It took ten squirts of Love’s Baby Soft on each wrist to make the scent last all day, but all 25 plaid-skirted girls in my homeroom had been seduced by the same ads, the ones that showed a girl caressing a horse’s muzzle or lounging in a field of flowers, sucking a lollipop.

The train is crowded today, everyone takes up twice as much room as usual in their floor-length trenches and barrel-busted down-filled parkas, plaid scarves glistening with bright beads that have already forgotten their crystalized earthward hurtle.

I had just spent the last six months unemployed, sitting on my couch in my eighty-degree Seattle apartment, hammering away at my Netflix queue. I rarely went out for drinks or dinner in an effort to conserve cash. My government check was enough to cover my rent and bills with a little left over to stock up on Kraft Dinner and ramen noodles.

My old lady, my baby-baby comes home and tosses my ass out of bed. What I mean is my baby hoists the mattress up like a human forklift (she’s got some killer thighs, man) until—me, already on the edge—I go a tumbling to the carpet.

n July of 1997, the female relatives of a 5-year-old girl from Delaware, Ohio took revenge on her molester by tying him up, clearing his ass of hair, covering the newly smooth skin with muscle salve and sodomizing him with a cucumber. The act inspired a documentary called The Cucumber Incident.

It took some three weeks for Monica Graf to stop calling me even after I'd gathered my self-respect and begged off the humiliating affair. Her late-night calls had taken on a reliable pattern—opening sweetly, then racing to a crescendo of abuse directed at me and the world in general. It was like listening to some profane “1812 Overture.”

The desert is brown. The buildings are brown. The formerly gray streets are brown with dust. The sky is blue.

My uniform is three shades of brown. The eight million Iraqis who live here are a multitude of browns. The backs of my formerly pink hands are burnt brown. The sky is massively and oppressively blue.

There are so many gorgeous photos of me. And I’m beautiful in every one of them; thin, perfect, frozen in time. And the drugs were lovely. They were like ice-skating with your best friend when you were eight, like falling in love, like living on cake. I was in New York for six years in a loft in the West Village when I first met Harry. Harry… that womanizing, shitty filmmaker of a man.

I met him wearing a barely breathable gold-and-black sequined dress, 5 ½ inch heels, and reindeer antlers. It was my company’s holiday shit-show, hosted by a swanky lounge on the Lower East Side. High ceilings and a trendy DJ booth. Dimly lit with black velvet curtains.

When people ask me about it I tell them my body’s at war with itself. My body is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict all bound up in blood cells. We have border control issues; half my insides misunderstand the other half, which means everybody is an enemy of somebody all inside me. Autoimmune is the wrong word. It's an identity crisis. A body politic problem.

Before I get to the tits, I need to set the scene a bit. I’ve been going to the same taco truck for about 6 months now every Monday. The truck is not much to look at: scattered veins of rust melting over faded graffiti.

A dozen years ago, the doctors took my lung. I didn’t tell my girlfriend, Margot, until just the other day because I was sure she would break up with me. I still smoke (cigarettes and weed) and she hates these habits in general. Now she's worried the remaining lung will suffer the same fate, that if I don’t stop soon, “it’s just a matter of time.”

What we were arguing about after Spencer’s funeral—Ramada Inn conference room, cold chicken finger buffet, carpet that felt like tree moss—was which part of the ceremony would have been Spencer’s favorite.

I’ve always looked like a good little boy, but I’m not. I’m very bad, and because I’m still somewhat of a “kid” it makes doing what I want easier. Generally speaking, I usually only want to do bad things.

We had sex in the morning when we woke up. Most couples can’t do that, but we never had anywhere to be right away, and that’s how we started our days. If Patrick knew I started this by saying that, he would have laughed, I hope.

Vincent scraped the remnants of dinner into the trash and handed the dishes to Cheryl for washing. Alexa and Harry, their spouses, were on the porch with a deck of cards and the last of the gin between them.

A broke hand is nothing new. At least it feels and looks broke. Wayne’s familiar with broke hands because he’d busted this one, the right one, before. One night at Leo’s pool hall, 22 years old, opening a beer bottle. He’d set that bottle cap against the metal rim of a corner pocket and whacked it hard.

They were tired from all of the sex. It was the weekend, which meant it was time for having sex and walking around their apartment without any clothes on. Every weekend worked that way. They would get home from work, take off their clothes, and have sex until they got tired.