Here is a fact: at sixteen, I watched my father take our pictures off the walls and clothes from their drawers as he packed up my brother and sister and took them away from our home in Jamaica.
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That time my dad took me camping by the Eel River at the Fortuna KOA. As we lay under the stars with the fire dying, he told me people eat spiders in their sleep—hundreds in a lifetime.
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Minutes after my feet touched moon dust, your voice creaked in the video message.
“The virus wins,” you chuckled in that half-slanted way you did when nothing was funny. Jaundice yellow laced its way across your cheeks.
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After the weather turned, so did we. For many, the end of fog led to the end of patience. Though we’d heard the cool grey city might become sun-bleached as Seville by the end of the century, someday had arrived sooner than anyone predicted.
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It’s very late, the policeman insists, for a woman and a girl. His flashlight drills into our car.
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Previous Sightings:
12 July 2022, Miracle Beach
Hugo Garcia went to Miracle Beach early in the morning. He wanted to beat the crowds. As he
bent to examine a dead crab, he heard a splash
You do not carry the dead through the front door of a house. Or else, more bodies will follow. So the bricklayers are here, sitting on the raised flower beds my mother painstakingly tends every morning.
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June, always rain. Always ants after it rains. Always beetles smacking against the window and stink bugs polluting the air no matter the weather.
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The house is yellow but used to be green. You can see the remnants of green when you walk up the porch steps and put your key in the lock, but of course you don’t need a key because you never lock it, none of you do,
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The day Yumi got her eighth piercing—a semicolon on her left eyebrow—her mother pulled her into the kitchen and gave her an ultimatum.
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He used to see his daughter, Maya, each Saturday. Her mother would drive her to his condo early in the morning, and he would have to be awake because the doorbell never woke him.
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Here is the father and here is the son and here is the midnight emergency room. If there was a mother she would be here too, but there is no mother, not anymore, just the father with the liminal-spacy eyes and the boy with the fluorescent mouth, a fractured glowstick dangling on a string around his neck.
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Two giant men came in and asked for quarts of strawberry. My hands were split from constant washing, from the soaped rag I used to wipe down counters. I opened the freezer.
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My heart is the small brown rabbit. We can recognize it from the other rabbits by the way it shivers, which I imagine is an indication of my anxiety. The hutch is large and made entirely of glass. The rabbits hop back and forth. They stare, unblinking.
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Carrie has your left breast clenched in her hands. You want to ask her to be gentler, but how much more vulnerable can she expect you to be?
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to sanctify our spaghetti with this many ungodly packets of sugar, dressing our noodles in a wet bed of banana ketchup, Eden cheese, and hot dog chunks that we watch you slurp in the backseat at 6am, because breakfast is God, and you will never have a meal so generous.
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Bernadette’s husband stands over a mound of dark, wet dirt. In one hand, a trowel, in the other, a weathered copy of Gardening West of the Cascades they had found at the bins last winter. It’s bloated with water, the plastic edge of the cover curling away from the paper backing.
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When we first started cohabitating, all our spinach would wilt. We both would buy separate bags on our separate Sunday supermarket runs. By month three, we made shopping a shared activity.
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I grew up in Vermont, but now I live in California, and I only ever return home to visit my mom. A red blood cell pumped back to the heart. Each time I return, her house shrinks.
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There are things that only people who really love you will tell you. Like, quiet as it’s kept, most of your headspace will be taken up by a seventh-grade field trip, one in mid-May to Water Mania, where all the young ladies will have to wear the same red swimsuit, but only yours will be the one with very pubescent pubic hair seeping out the sides, spirals pushing against the spandex.
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