Fiction
Queen of the Rodeo
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.
Advertisement
Fiction
Fiction
Painted Surfaces
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.
Fiction
Butter
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.
Fiction
The Museum of Cosmic Retribution
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.
Fiction
Automaton Boy
I wrote this story while reading Terrorist Assemblages by Jasbir Puar, and with some songs on repeat from an Iron & Wine album, The Shepherd’s Dog.
Fiction
Grottmata
The soldiers start rounding up us factory girls just before sunrise. We smoke cigarettes and stand in a line against the remnants of a brick wall that used to be a bakery, facing the sheer black of the mountains above the town as muted light spills across the fog and folds of the ridgeline. One girl wearing four layers of coats asks if we’re still getting paid, and everyone has a good laugh.
Fiction
Fiction
The Dark Devices
As so many pieces of this length do—and I’m not the only writer who will report this—the idea and storyline for “The Dark Devices” came to me in a very visceral, very disturbing (wait for it) flash. The writing itself? A little research on Pieter’s period and country before that could happen.
Fiction
Fiction
like blood on the mouths of death
I first saw them one evening in May. I couldn’t tell what they were: small, like kids, like me, but they rustled, raffia fronds for skin. My eyes fizzing with dreams, I found Mama cradled on the sofa, hugging herself. She wore that faded floral top she loved so much.
