was the cutting remark you served with a squirt of Peychaud’s bitters and a side of weekend guests. I’d delivered Oysters Rockefeller, still steaming in their shells, to the table. To make up for your stinginess, your brother took a double portion. I was so grateful I ignored the spinach stuck between his teeth. But not you. You made him the butt of jokes, as usual. He laughed easily and I admired him for it, even as I was dying inside at his brother’s coarseness. Even as I handed your brother a toothpick. The closest thing to acid was the way you flirted with your brother’s date by comparing ..read more

The frog is suspended in ice next to a red apple in the frozen, shallow pond. Its lips are parted where they meet the surface, as if taking a last sip of air. I stick out my tongue to feel the first snowflakes of the winter storm. Taste silence. I’m the only guest at the inn. The others left after the weather warning blared from phones over breakfast. This morning, my boss left me a voice-mail. “I’m sorry about your brother. I know you’re taking a couple of days, but I need you back asap.” And texts, “Call me while you’re driving back.”  When my twin brother fell sick in Autumn, I’d stru ..read more

We sat on the metal steps behind Belinda’s house and smoked hollow twigs. We used a whole box of matches because they kept going out and probably gave us cancer. A blue jay stilt-walked through the grass on ridiculous purple legs.  Two days, said Belinda, and it’s off to God Fucker school. Belinda said they loved God so much down there they wanted to fuck him, every day. Why go? I answered. Though I knew. Her best friend from church—Anne—was already there and wrote Belinda how awesome it was. How all the kids would watch hillbillies ride through campus on their moonshine donkeys. I doubt ..read more

The lynx appeared at night. New mothers up for 3 a.m. feedings witnessed the velvet-skinned animal slink between houses. Exotic dancers, trudging home with aching feet, caught sight of it behind Pizza Shack, the animal exhausted, alone, its scent musky with wet earth and something grassy and strange. Local radio hosts interrupted songs to announce the sightings and opened lines for call-ins. A majestic being, everyone agreed. A gentle and shy feline. A wonder. A gift. Did you hear about the lynx? people asked at the gas station, the bank, the car wash, and we said yes because everyone had. St ..read more

The day Lila finds out about the crabapple tree, her mom has to get the scarf out and tie her hands. That hasn’t happened in a while. But Dad is going to cut the tree down, Lila’s own. Normal kids’ moms don’t have to truss them up. Lila doesn’t know many other kids–she’s never gone to school, Dad’s always figured it’s not safe, and anyway the farm is way out here alone–but she does know she has never been normal. Her first memory is of the too-tight knitted slippers Dad shoved onto her baby feet. She worked one off, threw it as hard as she could… and the slipper shattered on the floor. Glass ..read more

The Angel Gabriel Tries to Ghost Me but he doesn’t know how to leave without fire and flood. He walks around my apartment putting things out of place: toothpaste in the junk drawer, scissors under the sink, clean clothes balled between couch cushions. The Angel Gabriel stands around clearing his throat and asking for things he has hidden until I reassure him of how sad I would be if he left. Secure again as the rightful object of desire, The Angel Gabriel gives me a going away present: a faceted stone pulsing with unearthly light. He says if I swallow the stone it will lodge in my core, keepi ..read more

Today’s Cali’s birthday and she’s eighteen, the tattoo needle pricking her shoulder sweeter than any birthday cake, the black outline of an anchor almost complete, teeth gritted as she peeks at the progress, avoiding the sight of the bloody rag in the tattoo artist’s other hand, her nails digging into the cracked leather of the chair’s armrests, wondering if her daddy made the same face when he got his anchor tattoo back in his Navy days, and she doesn’t care about her mother seeing it even though her mother hates tattoos, knowing her mother will say the tattoo is one more thing she’s inherit ..read more

Les Bird and I were walking our bikes along the banks of the creek that ran between the theater and the packing plant, and I can’t say why we were even walking because we always rode everywhere, anywhere we wanted to go, as long as we could pedal there, Les Bird on one wheel. He could wheelie for miles. I was proud to be his friend. That morning by the creek, the ground was covered in popcorn—dumped, we assumed, by the theater’s night shift, older kids from the high school. Their manager, Stevie, who nobody fucked with, lived in his Datsun truck with the cabover camper. We tasted the popcorn ..read more

When they were checking in, she ran into someone she used to know. He’d stuttered out her name and shaken her husband’s hand with too much vigor. He appeared to still be single. “Who was that?” her husband asked. Now, she was in the hotel pool, sitting on the steps half-submerged, watching her daughter practice her underwater handstands. That old question came back to her. “Did you hook up?” That was the question girls used to ask each other in warbling voices, the boy or man linguistically unacknowledged but contextually vital. In high school, the popular girls had dismissed her as fat and t ..read more

Second place winner in our 2022 flash fiction contest. Every summer, we waged war on the bamboo. Scientists say that taste is mostly smell, so maybe the smell of it crept into my father’s nose, slinking past his mustache, just as the roots snuck under the rusted, curling metal fence that separated us from our neighbor. Once it reached his nose, the only thing for it was to grab something sharp and begin to hack. “Vietnam invades,” he said, standing in the doorway to the backyard, the scorching sun behind him. * The only story he told of his time in the army was about getting stranded on some ..read more