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When my daughter was a newborn, I found I only had the attention span to write micro and flash; I wrote a lot of it. I was also sleeping very little at night and crashed most afternoons, which for me is when the weirdest dreams happen. “NotRob” was one of them.
We hear you laughing as you speed by on the interstate. In spite of what you might think of us, we are a proud town. We don’t need your understanding. We don’t explain. You couldn’t handle the answers.
This is a retelling of a Chinese folktale that I couldn’t get out of my head. It’s been through a lot of revisions. The two things that helped it come into its final form were cutting half the word count, and finding a voice for the main character that suggests that the horror is not only in what is happening, but those who might be complicit in the act.
Kayla watched the hot, empty cake pan smoke on the kitchen counter. It was her husband Henry’s birthday, and she’d planned a little surprise for him. A party, just the two of them, the way he liked it—no one to take any of her attention away from him.
Haw Par Villa in the rain was a splash of garish color. The dark red footpath, glistening wet. The ornate tiered gate that greeted visitors with a carving of a tiger, etched in gold and blue. The strange and unsettling statues scattered across the park—a woman’s smiling head on the body of a giant crab, a cluster of laughing mermaids with mouths a little too big for their faces.
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