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.
and on and on and on and on they ran, the Merry Men, running from a hundred and one arrows bought with taxes stolen twice over…
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.
I’m dancing with my best friend’s husband, under the influence of his jaws and thighs.
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.
You’re joking, I say, interrupting the steady bumping of the doctor’s bushy white mustache.
When Laika the space dog comes back, bulleted to earth in a tiny white escape pod that dissolves upon opening, nobody can believe it.
Before the headaches began, I thought myself sturdy: firm in my foundations, set square like a saltbox house.
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.
At the end of the meeting, the villagers agreed to contribute shillings and pounds to sponsor Elochi to a university in America.
It was spring and the hills were irradient, like they had to get out all their green in one short burst before catching fire.
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.
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.
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.
To be encased, Clint had always thought, was foolishness. Why allow yourself to be open to such sorrow?
“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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