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My wife sometimes asked what had gone wrong with us. She had always been our bank of compassion, the caretaker of our marriage, the one who diagnosed what was needed to keep us on track, and made sure that it was provided. I evaded the question. How could I tell her that somehow, along the way, she had transformed from the most beautiful person I had ever known to a grotesquerie, something it hurt me to even look at?
The Idiot looms like a tumorous moon in the morning sky as Morris County Animal Control Officer Bailey Butler passes Stantonsville’s last operating gas station and turns off onto Franklin Road. For a merciful half-mile, a run of white ash and pignut hickory screens the Idiot from her sight until the canopy recedes, but then there it is again. Its enormous shadow haunts the feet of the western hills.
1. There is no better friend than the dermestid. I found them first in the woods, adorning the staring sockets of a coyote skull. So small I could have crushed them, they accomplished more than my child hands could—crawling, chewing, cleaning better than any household sponge or brush.
Nena came to consciousness little by little. She was ever present in the air of apartment 5K in the seventy-unit building in Brooklyn, like the wafting scent of sewer gas coming from old drain pipes: it’s easily ignored but still makes you a little sick. Sofia, the old woman who lived in apartment 5K, believed in Nena.
My mom was sixteen when a band of boys took her out to the woods and bound her to a tree and tortured her to death, like in Jennifer’s Body, so you see her womb was kinda already out of commish by the time she got around to wanting to have me. A year ago, after my thirteenth birthday, she made her first and only concerted effort at explaining it.
by Kurt Fawver
The day before the blind missionaries first arrived in our village, we had been raided by one of Jurgen Blanco’s enforcement squads. Blanco’s people were all the same—gaunt, lupine-visaged mockeries of men and women with broken, half-formed grins that perpetually played about their mouths.
by Leyla Hamedi
Up on the hill, past the wrought iron gates, sat the house where twin sisters Sayeh and Roshan lived. As imposing as it looked, the house, like the gate, was kept in elegantly stellar condition. There were no loose shutters banging on windy nights.
by Dante Luiz
The last copy of Senhora (1972–1973) lies, with no identification tag, on the shelves of Cinemateca Brasileira, the largest audiovisual archive in Latin America. If anyone ever opened the tin cans, they would see that its quadruplex tapes are flaky, almost falling apart.
Watching Jules claw his way back to life was the hottest thing I’d ever seen. This was the kind of scene artists immortalized with gold and lapis lazuli illumination, the kind of scene that soared, heaven-seeking, up cathedral vaults, buoyed by choirs of castrati. One moment, Jules was twitching in a pool of his own blood, and the next, he shuddered back into himself, lips opening like a crescent moon.
The surgery is an aortic something-or-other—you don’t really bother to listen. You don’t need some surgeon barely out of pull-ups to tell you your heart hasn’t worked right since Sam died. They put you under for it, and isn’t that a wonder: to sleep without dreaming. Or if you do, the propofol makes you forget, and that’s almost as good.
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