The Good Parent Really, if you had a child, you would want one like mine. He’s never broken a dish, he smiles beatifically, he treats the most banal object with ludic curiosity. He once turned a Pez dispenser into a disaster relief aircraft, tossing bundles of emergency supplies in the form of hard candy pellets […]

I am in a forest clearing, by which I mean I am in a parking lot, awaiting my lover’s return from the RadioShack. The birds are in song and someone sneezes on a loop by the dumpster. I’ve cranked back my passenger seat for a better view of the sky through the windshield. The clouds […]

Crack Chicken There’s a paper plate on the counter and a plastic fork and it hurts my heart to see them just sitting there so i make an egg. I pour a little bit of sunflower oil into my small red frying pan and stick it on the hot plate. I put some pepper on […]

There was a golf cart stolen—one of us stole, the rest caught a ride—and on it we rattled through darkness, giddy with wind on our faces, the ditches off the road to either side shades darker than what was in front of us, pitch-black.  The tops of the trees ranged overhead.  Everywhere my vision fell […]

She’d woken with a premonition in the middle of the night. This was about a man she’d once loved. Sometimes a premonition arrives after the event it describes. (In that case, would we call it knowledge?) This man drew a circle around some things and not others. (This is common. Who doesn’t have their own […]

There was him and Anxin and me and Anxin was very young. This wasn’t a love triangle because I knew the dangers of wanting to make someone else’s dreams come true. I’d done that once before. We carried equipment—cables and things zippered in nylon. We did heavy lifting and then I sat in that pile, he called it, of water. […]