There’s a sad werewolf on my balcony. He broke up with his werewolf boyfriend—Gregov, an awkwardly lanky wolf who’s a bit of a flirt. This crying Lycan said he’s a vegetarian, but he’s munching on bac...

The first time a guy said I look like a man was at the Jamba Juice stand in the mall. He was still a boy, probably my age and sticky from adolescence. You look like a man. He said it as if he had th...

They give Darrell Grayson the option of Yellow Mama or lethal injection. There is no real fairness in this decision. In not being strung up in a Michael Donald sort of manner.

There aren’t flowers in Darnell’s yard, just big rocks. He unlocks the door and says, “Take off your shoes.” I do as I’m told. I’m wearing Vans. White Girl Shoes.

Erin says I’m supposed to find us a house that looks like the one we’re already in: a Dutch Colonial with arched doorways, a staircase wider at the bottom than the top, and a too-small kitchen. She wa...

I loved a bastard. He was awful sometimes but also his parents never married, a true bastard. When we met he was holding a radioactive drink and I wanted to lap it from his hand.

Smack me with what you know, baby, I’m asking for it. Make those ten dollar words zip like a switch, make that jargon sizzle. Sting me with words you can correctly pronounce so I’ll stop suspecting yo...

Caitlin enunciates the words  mother  and  kitchen  and  mopping  like each syllable has scrubbing properties, like she’s flossing with vowels, cleaning her mouth out for...

In the years I lived in that neighborhood, when I was twenty-seven and later twenty-eight, I visited the goldfish daily.

You probably remember it different. You probably remember the sun being so hot we had to close the shades in the middle of the day—that the AC couldn’t keep up, that the floors were sticky. The pizza ...

I liked the cover because there was a sexy man on it and I’m easy to manipulate, so I brought it to the register and paid a dollar. In the sun, I opened the book and found an inscription: To Russel, ...

No one I know has ever been to Taliaferro County, so I don’t believe it’s real. There is data out that says it has 1,700 or so residents and I’ve never met a single one. The closest I’ve come is I fou...

When the caterpillar is crawling in the dish, do not measure it with your ruler. Do not classify it according to the phases of growth illustrated in the chart in your book. These were the things of se...

They lived in Indiana together in a red, brick house. A famous writer lived there before them and left a signed map of New York City taped over the solid Midwestern writing desk. They wrote in bed, on...

His name was Joe-Thomas, I don’t remember his little brothers’ names. He was our age. He lit matches and threw them to his feet.

Somebody’s been stealing Mom’s bike. Her wheels, she likes to call it. The first time she left it on the side deck, which is visible from the street. Unfortunate, but preventable, I thought.

Minutes after my feet touched moon dust, your voice creaked in the video message.  “The virus wins,” you chuckled in that half-slanted way you did when nothing was funny. Jaundice yellow laced i...

Ted and Katie sit as far away from you and Amir as they can on the sectional. Ted looks uneasily at the baby on your lap. He’s like, is it gonna…? You smile and hold the baby out. Of course not, you r...

The seedlings first started growing from your nipples. You never knew that could even happen. Can I just pluck them out? you asked me, but they were too deeply rooted in your breasts, straight into yo...

Your friend tells you over the phone. She wants you to know what you are facing. You take the knowledge from her calmly, like accepting a small white box. The weight of knowing balances in your hands.

Outside was a man {had she seen him before?}. A non-descript man. He could have been any man. When she answered the door, it was about three seconds before he threw a vile lie in her face {a vial of l...

Yesterday, Marilyn from the web team brought me lunch from Snyder’s deli and I had to ask, What’s up? as if I did not know what her weekly check-in would bring me.

That time my dad took me camping by the Eel River at the Fortuna KOA. As we lay under the stars with the fire dying, he told me people eat spiders in their sleep—hundreds in a lifetime. They crawl tow...

It is said all man’s misdeeds may be attributed to Armabrach, a species of atom that swims the blood tides and makes savage man’s heart, clouds his brain and perplexes his eyes.

When our tía wasn’t pat-pat-patting masa to make sopes, or when she wasn’t zapateando, her heels ta-tapping and za-zazzing! on the kitchen floor (a luxury of living on the ground floor, no one to comp...

There are things that only people who really love you will tell you. Like, quiet as it’s kept, most of your headspace will be taken up by a seventh-grade field trip, one in mid-May to Water Mania, whe...

Some rogue cigarette flew into my eye. It was my second time ever in New York City. The ember sizzled. It was July. I screamed. Mia rushed to find a bathroom. We fled South Street Seaport and zigzagge...

My father once asked me, “Do you think white people know that fish have bones?” We were standing in the kitchen, watching the fish steam. Our hands were still scallion-y from the prep, but we wanted t...

Because of him, she bought her first pair of thong underwear. She paints her sad, short fingernails. She looks at the mirror as he fucks her from behind, wondering about her ass. Cellulite? Ingrown ha...

Grandma is usually quiet. She forgets names, dates, places, but she has moments of lucidity. She says she’s become a bird.

That time my dad took me camping by the Eel River at the Fortuna KOA. As we lay under the stars with the fire dying, he told me people eat spiders in their sleep—hundreds in a lifetime.

It’s very late, the policeman insists, for a woman and a girl. His flashlight drills into our car.

You can spend your time in the card aisle, but it’ll most likely just be wasted. There’s not much solace in those cards, not much heart or feeling or sincerity. Just little words like “Sorry” or “Cond...

Led Zeppelin has a history in my pants. They’ve lived and migrated all up and down my bra and underwear. They took up residence up in my pants when I was a heaping 14-year-old, crossing over from Depe...

We double-dutched in seventh grade and beat the girls from room 209 to win that trophy made of wire hangers and cardboard then went for pizza, grease sliding off the cheese like syrup. We chewed the r...

“Well, what about tomorrow after lunch,” she suggested, squinting up at him even with her sunglasses on. He was tall and she liked that. He was looking somewhere beyond her, over her left shoulder tho...

Even if it means no nachos, I don’t want to do any more of that hateful teaching! People who have never done any teaching seem to have difficulty understanding how I feel about this. Jesus, I’m drunk ...

Jude discharges liquid through her mouth all morning. She suffers from the opposite of motion sickness—she can’t handle the stillness. I take her to the mountains to find the longest, the curviest roa...

The obsession started when he was young. Coke cans. We were never sure why. They had to be Coke Classics, and they had to come from an Atlanta bottling plant. It took seven hundred and ninety-three to...

My mother says that she was young too, once upon a time. She says this in the cold dressing room of a department store the day before we leave for our last trip overseas. The people around us smell st...

Scott was so literal. We told him “break a leg” before he went on stage, and then he fell down the prop stairs and snapped his tibia in two places. The show didn’t go on for Scott. He was taken by amb...