FICTION
“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”
When Laika the space dog comes back, bulleted to earth in a tiny white escape pod that dissolves upon opening, nobody can believe it.
I don’t know why I was still talking about the rapture. I certainly didn’t believe in it. Regardless, it remained a thief…
“The woman was a catastrophe,” Carlos told me at the time. “But she was as honest as my face is ugly.”
Sitting at the bar on Pacific Avenue. With the seashells in the walls. Same bartender from last year, still here, making the same lethal Mai Tais.
Ever since your son brought you here, things have been different. He was crying when he dropped you off. You still don’t know why.
The young boy goes to bed and kisses his mother goodnight. He goes to bed and closes his eyes and wishes his family good sleep.
It was spring and the hills were irradient, like they had to get out all their green in one short burst before catching fire.
To be encased, Clint had always thought, was foolishness. Why allow yourself to be open to such sorrow?
Mama sped along the highway, unbothered by bits of gravel that flew up from the front tires and struck the windshield of the sedan.
She turns her back for me to fasten the rows of metal hooks. Why isn’t our small, tender freedom enough?
And then he feels that familiar sensation of drifting—when his body untethers from the material world and he soon dissolves into a fine, floating mist that evaporates into the atmosphere.
Darkness always follows.
I reached for my invoice, which Dr. George, holding it between thumb and forefinger as if it were a soiled diaper, dropped into my hand.
I’d never heard of anyone having a second baby right after the first one, but everything was so strange in those early days of motherhood that I just acted on instinct.
Hitting up homes peopled by those with nothing much to lose was an easy score. The less you had, the less likely you were to defend it. But this home was different. Its residents had a lot to lose and the will to fight for it.
Share some abandon.
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