fiction
When Laika the space dog comes back, bulleted to earth in a tiny white escape pod that dissolves upon opening, nobody can believe it.
Directly after the arrival of the Armada, this model made sense, as the gap between Unthulanian and Human cultures prevented a commensurable exchange of practices…
The day does not conclude with the gentle exhale of the earth, but with Mother Superior flipping the hourglass over, again.
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.
He used to hold my hand on Commonwealth. I wonder sometimes if he ever still thinks about my mouth.
She turns her back for me to fasten the rows of metal hooks. Why isn’t our small, tender freedom enough?
“The woman was a catastrophe,” Carlos told me at the time. “But she was as honest as my face is ugly.”
You’re joking, I say, interrupting the steady bumping of the doctor’s bushy white mustache.
You’ve been dreading this day since the moment you found out you were pregnant—perhaps even before.
I know you shouldn’t keep wild animals as pets, but I’ve had the same spider in my bathroom sink for over two weeks.
A man with a fistful of showbags said, “That cow sounds like a person trying to sound like a cow.”
To be encased, Clint had always thought, was foolishness. Why allow yourself to be open to such sorrow?
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.
A tortured simper uncoils itself across my mouth as I open another bottle of Penis wine.
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.
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.