In the throng for the tram she allows herself to be pushed back again and again and ends up getting on last. Most of the passengers stay near the door but Esther presses her way through the tightly-packed crowd. It is drizzling outside and a layer of droplets glistens on scarves, jackets, people’s hair. Esther …
We met Officer Hughes the first day Henry had a “Bad Sleep,” that’s what we call it, because it sounds a lot less menacing than “night terrors.” Henry was about two hours into his nap. I was working out back in the studio when he screamed so loudly that Tabitha Peyton, two doors over, called …
The thirty-aught-six dangled loose as a length of rope from the boy’s arm while he high-stepped through the weed-choked yard. He gripped the rifle by its forestock, and as he went it tilted like a lever, ground and sky alike passing between its sights. Occasionally the aim of its barrel crossed paths with his face. …
The wheels on the bike squeaked rhythmically as she headed home, passing yellow buses stopped at the streetlight in front of the middle school. Occasionally friends in window seats called out from the buses, or classmates who recognized her and just wanted to be loud. She waved back, feeling like Miss Teen USA. She was …
It’s true I made you up as I went along. All the more reason, I say, that I should be able to make you go away when I want. But you have proved to have a solidity not normally associated with the imaginary realm. I know that when we first met you were just an …
Her child was a savage child, and when he was grown, they had to migrate with the seasons to keep his savagery in check, the birds passing south in the sky as they went north. The cold, it seemed, could dull his instincts, mitigate the bloodlust, but too much and his core temperature dropped. He’d …
Macie’s knuckles felt cool on her eyelids, her hands silky from an evening of lavender lotion massages and drippy polka-dot manicures. She let them rest there—gently, barely touching—before digging them into the soft meat of her reddening eyes, then dragging them down her cheeks, through her tears. Leaving marks. Tonight wasn’t supposed to go like …
I can’t escape my job. Everywhere I go I see ads for the company. On the subway, the sidewalks with our company logo engraved in concrete, the talking billboards which feature the intertwined bodies of flawless men and women in the downtown AdZones. I’m good at what I do. PlayMatez look and feel real: warm …
MORPHOLOGY: the Wooly Shagruth resembles a bipedal American bison. In place of hooves, it has rough, conical talons it uses to kill prey and drill into mountainsides where it constructs its nests. Annie is underground with her Secret Lover. They are in their meeting place, a cavern roughly the size of her parents’ living room. …
My boys won’t eat. The youngest doesn’t swallow as much as smear and fling. As though he thinks food’s taken through the skin. I blend his baby glop, peas and carrots and little rags of meat pureed together by the hurtling blade, and when I bring it to him strapped in his high throne he …