Longshore Drift
We go to islands to ask something of ourselves, to seek out respite, to find new worlds.
The Hsiehs
My mother was the darkest and poorest of her sisters, and though she wore her red dress from Ross with the matching belt, Aunt Hsieh said she looked like a ladybug or a boil that required lancing.
A Conversation with Bronwen Carson
“I think we don’t need anymore glorifications of toxic masculinity, violence, and cars that get two miles to the gallon.”
A Conversation with Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
“I don’t believe in a world without critical thinking, because what’s the point?”
A Conversation with Shane Kowalski
What does a community without storytelling look like, sound like, etc.? What do the members of that community do? Not talk to each other? But not talking to anybody is just another kind of storytelling…
The Internet Play
Marie Mayweather had been doxxed. Or rather, the bot formerly known as Marie Mayweather had been doxxed. She had passed successfully for many years, thirty-six of them, in fact, at last check.
Dinner, Again
The youngest vegan child, Jeremy, was over at his friend Emma's house. Knowing the rules, Jeremy asked in advance what Emma’s family would eat that evening. They planned on fish pie for supper, so he asked to bring the fish.
A Kind of Happiness
She takes turquoise pills — more than she should — to fall asleep. That and the wine usually allow her to make it until the alarm goes off, but today she wakes early, when the sun is just rising.
Market Dynamics
You can’t imagine what it was like for him to pull in behind the Circle K and tell the kids behind the dumpster that he had pills for sale.
Bleeding Out
Lately fearing apocalypse, fearing that it will huddle us together like a nest of newborn dying mice, fearing that our mistakes have caught up with us, I pick my way through the dry leaves and fallen saplings in the few acres of woods that we still own on a small ridge above the village we call home.
Discretion
Roe’s gaze fell. He put the car in park and stopped to think. He tried to explain, as best he could, that discretion is integral to a marriage of complicities — that jailbreaking requires us to steal together.
MIA
“We’ll deliver it as soon as it turns up. I’ll need your name and a description of a few items inside the missing piece, please.” The office was cramped, papers stacked high, central air blasting from a vent overhead. The woman tapped her pen and looked past me at the line outside her door. What could I tell her? The purple strap-on would be easily recognizable; the matching fur nipple clips. ]