CW: violence and suicide All Children Eat Their Mothers It starts in the womb, then moves to the tit, of course, and only continues from there. I am constantly taking small bites of my mother. Every time she tucks a loose lock of hair behind my ear, I sink my teeth into the bones of her hand, before pulling the lock loose against my face again. When she stands at the door with her purse strung over her arm, telling the new babysitter what to feed me and when to tuck me in, I gnaw at the soft flesh of her middle. She smooths back my hair and says, Ok, sweet girl. Be good and eat your supper for ..read more

I. The summer we moved to Florida was the same summer Bug Juice premiered on the Disney channel. We were living at the Westin hotel in Fort Lauderdale. We spent our days house hunting and our afternoons swimming in the hotel pool. We didn’t have any furniture. We didn’t know where we were going to school come fall. But it was June, and then July. And every Saturday night, I’d beg my brother to let me watch Bug Juice for the twenty-two minutes it aired. There was a curly-haired girl named Stephanie. She said the girls in her cabin were mad at her because all she cared about was boys. They calle ..read more

One Wednesday morning my husband Jerry brushed his teeth and then disappeared. He is still gone. I lay awake in our bed each night, wait for the sound of his keys in the lock, and study his birds. I prefer to keep our bedroom sparse, but Jerry likes whimsy. So I let him line the window sill with these porcelain birds, most of which are white and faceless. Smack dab in the middle of them sits this single brown owl that’s been expertly painted. Its wings are open, its claws are stretched behind a fist-sized body. It watches me with sad eyes when I wake in the morning and before I go to sleep at ..read more

Content warning: sexual assault.   His hands are everywhere, squeezing your shoulders, pinning your arms, grabbing your ass and smashing you against his clammy body so close you feel all his hearts beating beating beating, and you gasp and you say Mr. Mollusk, what—but he’s covering your mouth, your eyes, you can’t move can’t see but you smell, you taste, stench of clams on his breath, tang of brine on his tongue, turn away but he yanks back your head, no, try not to gag, you’ve never liked seafood, or the sea, a bottomless murk hiding things that will topple you, drag you down, you ..read more

Darryl eats eggs for breakfast every day and leaves his crusted plate on the table for someone else to clean. Sometimes the eggs are runny and he sops up the orange runs with toast. Sometimes the eggs are burnt and he feeds them to the dog and doesn’t eat till noon. He wakes up early and goes to bed late, he never gets no sleep. Some people call Darryl the most miserable man in Tennessee. Darryl’s wife steals his money in front of him, shoves it right in her purse. Darryl’s kids hate him, his kids call him “loser” and “fatso” and “gay.” Darryl watches sports on TV and his team always loses. Da ..read more

I stole the notebook. Is this a sentence? I’m looking for hands. Take a stand here. Yes? Do we all agree? Anthony, I welcome you to remove your earbud and join us. Even if your music is off, your extraction of that plastic snail consoles me as a gesture of respect. Thank you. I stole the notebook. Why is this a sentence? Kylee? Because it feels complete? Yes, I just repeated Kylee’s answer in that radically ambivalent way I have of making you uncertain whether I’m validating or questioning it. Bear with me. I’m seeking to destabilize my position in the locus of power. If this feels hypocritica ..read more

It was during their slow dancing that Rod saw the jaguar. He and Billie were twirling in the trailer to Kenny Rogers when Rod reached out and flipped the lights off for romance. That was when the kitchen went from bright to dark, and the outside went from black to blue, and out past the picture window he saw Priscilla the Peruvian jaguar crouching under the honeysuckle. Rod grabbed Billie by the shoulders and stopped their waltz: “Don’t you leave,” he whispered. “You understand me?” Then he went and got his firearm from an old Ritz cracker tin under the loveseat and walked toward the front doo ..read more

Volunteering At the nursing home, the soft and brittle were flipped twice a day to keep their skin from melding to the bedsheets. As I passed one of the cots, a papery hand grabbed mine and pressed something sticky into it. It’s candy, the old woman said. I opened my hand to look. Some were oozing from their wrappers, some had teeth marks. Some were whole and new. They were from a brand that had gone out of business in my childhood. It’s dementia, a passing nurse explained. No, it’s candy, the old woman said. No, the nurse said, carrying a bucket of human waste out of the room, it’s dementia ..read more

My surgeon looked like a giant rabbit. I was leery about letting him cut into me, because he was from Texas and had a mustache. His medical degree made no difference. I didn’t trust Texans, and a rabbit was just a rodent in disguise. I set my sights on the woman surgeon in the practice, the one who, according to the website, was an organic gardener, rescued greyhounds, and thought of her patients as friends. Of course, she was booked.  So, I got the Easter bunny. He’ll be sticking his paws into me on Tuesday at 8:30 a.m. Dr. Rabbit informed me that my right ovary’s abnormality appeared id ..read more

Lake Day Sometimes we take rides on our friend Charles. These rides can be quite a hoot because Charles is a frog the size of a dump truck. One morning we rode Charles to Waffle House. We ordered 3002 hash browns: 2 for us and 3000 for Charles. Then we hopped along to the lake because Charles is too big for the pool. If he sits in the pool, then there isn’t a pool anymore, just Charles. On the way to the lake Charles ate some watermelons from the watermelon man’s stand—slorp!—real fast, shooting out his tongue the size of a down spout. We got to the lake, and it turned ..read more