Image by Denis Doukhan from Pixabay Laminated eight-and-a-half by eleven posters on every telephone pole in a three-block radius announced our neighbors had lost their Yellow Ball Python. We stopped to read the signs while the dog tugged and pissed. Black text on white background—no snake photos, just a sun emoji to lighten the mood. Sunny was LOVED and LOST also SKITTISH, but FRIENDLY, NOT DANGEROUS and NON-VENOMOUS. TEXT IF FOUND. DO NOT TRY TO HANDLE. Soon after, we started the chain of jokes. One of us stepped out for a jog, “Watch out for Yellow Ball Pythons!” Opening a car door. Of cou ..read more

Photo by Hazwan Kosni on Unsplash Xavier and seven-year-old Jeffy are walking the eastside of Tallahassee to Krispy Kreme a mile from Yvette’s townhouse, and on the Park Avenue overpass, Jeffy excitedly points out wisteria blooming beside the railroad below. The train will come soon. Xavier and Yvette work in the capitol building. They’ve been a thing about four months. This is the first time Xavier has been alone with her son. Such trust pleases him. Yvette knows Xavier is married. Of course, Xavier’s wife doesn’t know about Yvette. But Xavier promised divorce, in time. Affairs need to be p ..read more

Photo by Krzysztof Hepner on Unsplash Being fourteen is balancing on a bridge in the middle of the night and wondering if staying would bring just as much pain as going. You’ve already run away from home, hopped the brick wall out of the backyard and into the street, pounded the pavement in your white Authentic Vans and sweet little crop top, a half-broken iPhone stuck in your back pocket—the house key clutched between your sweaty knuckles like that’s what’ll protect you if someone decides you’re sweet. You’re out like you wanted. And you think it could turn into chaos in a second despite th ..read more

Benny Every night, my mom reads to me and then cries in the living room when she thinks I’ve gone to sleep. For the past month, we’ve been reading The Sea of Monsters, second in the Percy Jackson series. I don’t tell my friends that a 13-year-old still has his mom read to him every night. But I love Percy and my mom says my dyslexia makes me listen better than most people. I think she’s right. I don’t know how to explain it, but I can see a book better when she reads it. When we get to the part about the Sirens and their songs that make you see your deepest desire, I can tell she is thinking ..read more

They mistook my skill of memorization for interest, I think. That’s how it started. I easily remembered diners’ first visit to Cafe bord de Mer, but Margot and Sandi seemed to think it meant they were special. “Wow, you’re good,” they said together, sounding rehearsed. After that, they came back regularly, Sandi with some kind of wild earrings; Margot in her red, looped scarf. Like with other customers, I looked for clues in what Margot and Sandi ordered, desperate to understand them through their desires. Margot’s fingers, with their snubbed-down nails, gripped her after-dinner coffee cup an ..read more

Photo by Annie Vo on Unsplash As Bertha shuffled into Pig’s Pantry grocery store she saw a man in the foyer she didn’t recognize leaning against the shopping carts. The trousers on his slim-cut suit were hemmed short and his naked ankles jammed into his pleather wingtips reminded her of string cheese and for that, if nothing else, she hated him. “Hello there,” he said, offering her a cart. It was new and glossy and rolled across the polished concrete easily as if of its own accord. It wasn’t at all like the jangly carts she was used to. The ones they had a month ago before her hip replacemen ..read more

Image by Taisiia Shestopal, courtesy of Unsplash 1.) Sleeping Babies Lie One of my clients is a medical technician, who carried the infant out of the daycare where I work. The medical technician, after dropping off his own toddlers, accompanied the infant’s father with the infant’s mother. She stuck her hands in her denim pockets before he was charged. He had been trying to sleep, and the baby was crying. They decided to take the baby to the daycare and keep it wrapped in its blanket, asking us not to wake the baby as they pretended it was sleeping. This way, eventually, when we daycare work ..read more

Photo by Ravi Singh on Unsplash All those ducks you’ve been feeding all summer?  The one you call Hillbilly because his beak is cracked and deformed or something?  So fun, so crazy how he’d come up and rip the bag of bread from your hand when you weren’t looking.  Well look at him now.  His leg is somehow all kinds of broken.  Him unable to fly and how he works hard just on his hobbling. And your Grandma Pete who takes you to Argyle Pond every single day knows it’s wrong.  To let an animal suffer.  So that’s the only reason the two of you brought the dog ke ..read more

(Photo by Nathaniel Shuman on Unsplash) Since it no longer exists, I can’t name it here, so I’ll have to say it like this: the first letter to disappear was the twenty-sixth letter, the last letter of the alphabet. And understand this—it disappeared everywhere, each and every instance of it, without leaving an outline or even a shadow to remind the world that it had once looked like an N turned on its side, though usually with a bit more flair than that. On the screen of every desktop, laptop, tablet, and smartphone, this letter flared brightly for a second and then blinked out, not unlike a ..read more

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash The first forgetting is an accident. Arden leaves her 2pm meeting fuming, replaying the moment when her boss slid her idea out from under her. Anger pools in her scalp and rappels down her hair. Snap. She breaks a split end off. Suddenly she can’t remember what she was so angry about. She freezes. Each moment has to be caught in amber now: labeled, polished, preserved. When she and her sister visit their grandmother, they spend the afternoon holding memories up to the light. The day after their grandmother’s stroke, Willow declared war on forgetting. But now ..read more