Fiction

In Another Life

The two of them stand framed together in the fragile glass, she thin-faced with a worried mouth, he like a wisp of smoke with flint at its center, vulnerable but still volatile within.

Revolutions in Time

My mother looks so beautiful when she hasn’t yet birthed me. Despite the spotty glow of the traffic lights, her beauty is noticeable; she is still young and doesn’t know postpartum depression, sleepless nights shredded by my wails, white suburban mothers’ pursed red lips as she picks me up from school in her laundromat clothes.

Crosscurrents

Whenever you don’t want to be who you are, you call yourself Margaret Jefferson. And that’s who you are now, or who you are when you’re not yourself, walking into the conference room of an accounting firm in a random midtown Manhattan building for an open writers’ meetup in the fall of 2017.

Assisted Living

Mary’s not at dinner and no one knows why. Roy is limping but at least he’s up walking again after last month when he fell by the mailboxes and dislocated his new knee.

Death Defiant Bomba or What To Wear When Your Boo Gets Cancer

You’ll wear five-inch black pumps because they make that annoying noise that alerts everyone everywhere in the whole wide world that you’re arriving.

Remedies

As long as I can remember, it seemed like anything that could go wrong with the body, Great-Grandma knew how to fix, or at least ease away until forgotten.

Battenkill

People need the company of other people. It’s how people are made. They can’t help it. This need can be degrading to a person’s soul, if souls are real.

Car Wash

While I wait for him to pull the trigger, I drive to the grocery store. Pick up milk, chewing gum, sponges. Drop off the dry cleaning: the dress I splattered with a spaghetti stain at Shana and Calvin’s wedding last month. Ignore the stench of the rotting plant in the backseat and keep the AC rippling.

Ghosts of Doubt

He stands before the class, the lectern his wheelhouse, the teen- or twenty-
something-aged students his sea, the sky in the back windows his horizon. The worn paperback before him lays open to a page. If he were to brush it to
the floor, the spine would strike first and the leaves would fall three-quarters right, a quarter left. The book would lay open on page 63, just as it does on the podium.