Amelia did not like to return to a dark house. She did not like the blank windows, or how the empty hall amplified her key fitting the lock, the turn and then fall of the tumbler, or how loudly the light thrummed in the fixture above after she found the switch. She did not like …
The woman who came to pick up the heroin was deaf. Later Glen realized he’d known that from the minute he saw her. There must have been some little clue, a certain darting of the eyes or clench-jawed expression, something he recognized from all the years with his brother, Donald. But there would never be …
My grandmother whispers the rosary, her dresser an altarof Kleenex, perfume bottles, an empty vase. The altarcleaned of VHS tapes where she once watched crowsand gulls cloak the sun, where Rosemary’s womb is an altar.There is too much horror in the daytime for her sleeplessnights. Politicians say my family strangles geese on the altarsof dining …
My grandmother at first refused, but the truth slippedthrough like sun breaking a pond’s icy face—there was a girl wearing a pearl gown who bridge-bent,a snowdrop on the church steps, and said Erzulie stepped inside.Wreathed in Communion buds, the girl almost drownedkissing her reflection in an alabaster baptismal font.The goddess shivers into a bride who …
Mrs. Ho always had a hard time getting to the Guang Ming Shan temple on her own. From Bedok, where she lived, there was a change of trains at City Hall, going from green line to red. Alighting from the train at Bishan and pushing through the crowd, she often had trouble finding her way …
Maybe it’s wrong to be a person who can be made happy by a lamp. This is an old notebook, from spring 2011, but I know exactly which lamp I had in mind.The question has haunted me for some time.If you’re this sort of person, your mind will fly past wrong, even ignore happy, to …
Researchers have found that beetles of this species use the bright glow from the Milky Wayto navigate during night-time operations.—Wikipedia It’s not as bad as one might think,rolling your little dung ball around the park on a moonless night—a jobonly you can do because nobody else knows how to make a perfect sphereof the shit …
I should be home making salad.Instead we’re walking through a parking lot the size of Rhode Island, bathed in the glow of a hundred and one streetlamps.Then we’re standing in a line of Americans waiting to pay a buck-fifty for an all-beef dogthat sticks out each end of the bun in a kind of rueful …
the body can draw perfect circles when it needs to say what a body wants to saytake care take care the body says when it circlesa body when it wants to stay circles into suffering and clings there a body fins water a body feigns buoyancewhen it dives a body dives from a high board …
Central to Đà Nẵng uncovered hundred faces switched up nouns.I couldn’t write. Or 1968I couldn’t speak. What part of me was shocked? There-fore an orifice deceived; and I was razed to jumble pyrophoric kinksferocious as our compound partially declassified as tan. The amulet, a sentencewithout limbs. I couldn’t walk out from such frames unharmed; and …