FICTION
“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”
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.
She turns her back for me to fasten the rows of metal hooks. Why isn’t our small, tender freedom enough?
It all started with the curse of my tits. Women’s bodies are cursed. Everyone tries to look at them, everyone tries to ignore them.
To be encased, Clint had always thought, was foolishness. Why allow yourself to be open to such sorrow?
When I was on earth I was a pretty good kid. I only got drunk when I needed to get drunk.
The most entertaining thing about Miguel is that when he was 13 he dislocated his shoulder playing basketball and can now pop it in and out of place. There is nothing particularly interesting about Miguel.
I’m dancing with my best friend’s husband, under the influence of his jaws and thighs.
When Laika the space dog comes back, bulleted to earth in a tiny white escape pod that dissolves upon opening, nobody can believe it.
Mama sped along the highway, unbothered by bits of gravel that flew up from the front tires and struck the windshield of the sedan.
He used to hold my hand on Commonwealth. I wonder sometimes if he ever still thinks about my mouth.
A man with a fistful of showbags said, “That cow sounds like a person trying to sound like a cow.”
I loved Rena as much as a patient could love their gynecologist. We had tea together in her office. I cried when she asked how I was doing, and she showed me pictures of her terriers.
You’re joking, I say, interrupting the steady bumping of the doctor’s bushy white mustache.
At the end of the meeting, the villagers agreed to contribute shillings and pounds to sponsor Elochi to a university in America.
“The woman was a catastrophe,” Carlos told me at the time. “But she was as honest as my face is ugly.”
Share some abandon.
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