Room 1 Which is pink or maybe sugar-white, and a cot and little fists stick out of a blanket and peachy cheeks and my mum bent over. The room is always quiet and milky and her little nails scratch…
“My stepdaughter is a horse.” The school psychologist waits for me to say more, then resumes her review of the pedagogical strategies she and Lilja’s teachers have employed. She speaks at a clip that makes me wonder if her…
And the sun and the sun and the sun! And the wet grass, wet on the nose, scent of dew and worm and no yes no yes, another! Meat, meat in the bread, fire on the meat. Somewhere in…
My mother sees my father’s face everywhere. Last week it was in our neighbour’s wilting asters. Then, an angry version in a banana she decided to save. “Maybe it’ll brown into the Virgin Mary, and we can sell it…
My mother never ripened. When she was young, they bit into her and stopped the natural ripening process. After they’d spit her out, she stayed green until she began to rot. At the end of her life she was…
When I was a young boy, my mother showed me how to tune the radio to hear the voices of the dead. The secret, she explained, lay not only in the frequency one landed on but in the precise…
This is a story that has already happened. It is also happening right now. It is never not happening. In a land that touches our own, there lived four sisters. Like all, they were both and not special for…
Mitchie’s mechanical pencil shatters into a hundred billion trillion pieces. “Dewanda, behave!” the teacher screams at me. She don’t know us or our names or remember that Dewanda goes to a new school now. So we don’t call her…
We fill up on deep-fried bricks of cheese and rib eyes big as our heads at Burly’s Roughrider Bar & Steakhouse. Our neatly laced Merrells and moisture-wicking Patagonias set us apart from the mud-splattered, steel-toed boots under most every…
I told my mom I loved her at a gas station in Minnesota but I’m not sure she heard. The cashier must’ve been stocking drinks or something so it felt like it was just me and her in there.…
