I’m at the edge of a dance floor standing next to the Russian boy. He brushes his fingertips against my back, and I laugh and nod as he talks, laughter as a replacement for words. I move onto the dance floor and he watches, his eyes tracing the curves of my arms as I raise …
Iris is sitting on a metal stool in the back room of Peter’s gallery. Her mother is perched on the edge of a shabby velvet couch, drinking coffee that Peter offered her from an electric pot and circling programs she wants to watch in the TV Guide. The room smells like turpentine and patchouli soap …
When I was seventeen and vacationing with my family in Montauk, I went with a man down into the cabin of his sailboat. I’d gotten up early while my family was still sleeping and put on the ragged skirt I’d made out of old jeans, and then I walked down the road to the marina …
Just because a priest offered her a brownie and asked her to, Jenny knew she didn’t have to drive 240 miles to the ragtag middle of Missouri. She didn’t have to do it even though Bob Cassidy was the nice priest from the Catholic church in Wolf Pass, Illinois, who’d buried her husband Reecie. The …
No one else has noticed the hawk, though it’s been perched in the tree above them for at least twenty minutes. How long it might have been there before Joseph spotted it, he doesn’t know. It’s larger than any other birds in the park, an adult Cooper’s, he thinks, gripping the gnarled branches of a …
I’d stopped into the Wawa on Joppa Road for cigarettes and was heading back to the car when someone shouted my name. By the back entrance, an Asian guy waved from under the awning. He started up the sidewalk, stepping around a white girl rummaging through the trash. When the sun revealed his broad, grinning …
They’d made a promise to wait out death together, the sort of passion project concocted by girls who scorned trinkets like “best friend” pendants and bead bracelets spelling out their names. No, for them, the matter was serious. They’d run away from home. No, they’d stay exactly where they were and outrun time. They stood …
The goat neck arrives at the table looking more like itself than Louise expected. The tacos are DIY, it turns out, so rather than a tangle of shredded meat that could quickly be wrapped in its warm, round delivery device and dispatched into her mouth, the protein is still intact, cylindrical and headless, balanced on …
They met at the coffee shop she said was her favorite. It was a vegan coffee shop. Being vegan was a thing they had in common. They had other things in common as well, but this was a new thing they had, and so it seemed like a safe place to start. Sorry I’m late, …
The tarp under our feet flaps in the southbound wind and loose asphalt shingles begin to fly off the roof faster than we can nail them down. Mateo jumps up from where he’s crouched and starts setting down hammers, drills, one-pound boxes of roofing nails atop anything that looks like it might fly off into …