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.
Read More
June, always rain. Always ants after it rains. Always beetles smacking against the window and stink bugs polluting the air no matter the weather.
Read More
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,
Read More
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.
Read More
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.
Read More
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.
Read More
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.
Read More
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.
Read More
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?
Read More
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.
Read More
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.
Read More
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.
Read More
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.
Read More
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.
Read More
The Mandarin in Aunty Li’s new American neighborhood came in a disordered mélange of dialects. Though she’d learned to find comfort in it, she hadn’t heard a quick tongue carry her childhood town’s flavor of northern China in a while.
Read More
I liked the cover because there was a sexy man on it and I’m easy to manipulate, so I brought it to the register and paid a dollar. In the sun, I opened the book and found an inscription: To Russel, with Love. John.
Read More
Erin says I’m supposed to find us a house that looks like the one we’re already in: a Dutch Colonial with arched doorways, a staircase wider at the bottom than the top, and a too-small kitchen. She wants a fresh start in a familiar place.
Read More
In the years I lived in that neighborhood, when I was twenty-seven and later twenty-eight, I visited the goldfish daily.
Read More
My father once asked me, “Do you think white people know that fish have bones?” We were standing in the kitchen, watching the fish steam. Our hands were still scallion-y from the prep, but we wanted to see the glass lid turn cloudy.
Read More