IN THE EVENINGS after she gets out of the shower, which she takes with the bathroom door ajar so that you and a nurse can call to her every two minutes and make sure she’s okay, you help your daughter thread her i.v. tubes and monitor wires through the wide sleeves of her hospital gown, … Continue reading In 2020 Everyone Got COVID But She Got An Eating Disorder Instead
GOLETA, CALIFORNIA, is known as the Goodland — avocado and citrus groves, lush farms, Pacific beaches — but I only know it as the Postal Badlands. It’s 1981, I’m thirty-one, and I hate my job. My head pounds as I walk in. The mail processing plant overwhelms me. It’s larger than a baseball field, noisier … Continue reading Random Distribution
GABBY MCCURTRY PULLED INTO the narrow garage under her townhouse. The day she’d moved in, she tied plastic spoons to bright yellow yarn, suspended them from the ceiling as parking parameters. She eased her car forward, nudged the dangling spoons, and peered into all corners. Once certain she was alone, she pushed the gearshift into … Continue reading Risk Management
EVERYTHING ABOUT ANSON VAYE was underground. His life, his career – if you could call it that – even his personality had the feel of something that had spent most of its days covered in earth. A jack of all trades and a practitioner of none. One late barroom night, some professorial sloshed egghead announced … Continue reading The Man Comes To Town
OLD SAMSON COULDN'T FEEL his hands because of the coldness of the gun. Or maybe it was the snow that gathered on his jacket, looking like the ash in the dead fire pit back at camp. But the numbness steadied his aim. He was chilled beyond shivering. No longer did his body fight off the … Continue reading The Morph Deer
FINN HAD BEEN FOUND on a street corner near Ellie’s office. Thankfully, she didn’t have to pass that spot on her walk to work, and each morning she determinedly avoided looking in that direction. Instead, she’d concentrate on the smells of toasted bagels cutting through the winter air from the bakery, or the thump of … Continue reading Finn’s Corner
ELEANOR JACKSON STUDIED her body in her closet door mirror. She had avoided looking into this mirror for several years and always had it covered up by clothes hanging from a row of hooks above it. But now she removed the clothes and inspected her body in fascination. A waist that had expanded over the … Continue reading Rewind
STANDING IN LINE for our food stamps, I thought of my new love, a tiny Asian stripper with two young kids working it in a KCDC housing project polluted with bloody gangsters while trying hard to make it out – killing rats and the resident sewer roaches, wanting that degree from the community college, somehow … Continue reading Surviving It All
SHANNON IS SEARCHING for the barcode on a box of trash bags when a commotion breaks out near the self-checkout registers. A male voice, strident: “—coupon says buy two get the third free! It’s right here, I’m looking at it!” Dennis’s voice, low and soothing, indistinct. The customer: “It’s only expired by a week!” The fluorescent lights … Continue reading Ant Mill
HOT WINDS RACED through the canyon, turning the acrid air thick. Desiccated flora spun aimlessly. Creatures lay dead and those dying writhed in agony upon the hard land. Bodies heaved like bellows, tongues flapping over rotting flesh. No man or animal sought inspiration in such turmoil. No thought or habit — good or treacherous … Continue reading Forsaken