FICTION
“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”
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.
My new neighbor is making a violin from a cigar box. He got the cigar box from a guard. The guard, presumably, got it from outside the Fence.
“The woman was a catastrophe,” Carlos told me at the time. “But she was as honest as my face is ugly.”
At the end of the meeting, the villagers agreed to contribute shillings and pounds to sponsor Elochi to a university in America.
When Laika the space dog comes back, bulleted to earth in a tiny white escape pod that dissolves upon opening, nobody can believe it.
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.
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.
None speak of how the streets collide in coarse seams like scars, the fresh cobbles unable to level with the ones shaken from their mortar by uncountable seasons.
She turns her back for me to fasten the rows of metal hooks. Why isn’t our small, tender freedom enough?
I don’t know why I was still talking about the rapture. I certainly didn’t believe in it. Regardless, it remained a thief…
I pushed my nose to within an inch from the rug. I sniffed, and sniffed, and I smelled something…not quite right, but I couldn’t place it.
Allanson looked out of the viewport, at the ragtag flotilla of ships trailing behind, some of them slow to catch up. It was to be expected with the little time that they’d had to cobble the fleet together.
Mama sped along the highway, unbothered by bits of gravel that flew up from the front tires and struck the windshield of the sedan.
You’ve been dreading this day since the moment you found out you were pregnant—perhaps even before.
A man with a fistful of showbags said, “That cow sounds like a person trying to sound like a cow.”
The day does not conclude with the gentle exhale of the earth, but with Mother Superior flipping the hourglass over, again.
I’m dancing with my best friend’s husband, under the influence of his jaws and thighs.
Share some abandon.
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