It happens in our sleep; we wake one otherwise normal morning to find the Garden District lawns overrun with towering green stalks and weird red blooms, delicate and menacing. When the owner of Holiday Heaven on Government Street committed suicide …
Fiction
The Long View
So mom brings a guy home tonight—fourth fucking guy in a month—and guess what? He has a tattoo that says I Love Mom. It’s on his chest. They both think it’s hilarious. He finds it so hilarious he farts …
Late Shift
I steal home in the morning to find my younger brother on his knees. Pike’s fingers are jammed into something that looks like an engine. There’s newspaper covering the floor, and he wipes the grease off his hands before eyeballing …
Bigger
Technically, the condition was inoperable. The doctors had never seen anything like it and neither had the dressmakers.
The girls lived in the old farmhouse on the top of the hill with their sweet mother Linda. It’s not the kind …
The Cherry Wood Heart
The black-and-white photograph accompanying Quetsch’s obituary might just as likely have been taken years before or after I worked for him. I never knew him as anything but old and can’t imagine him otherwise. Yet the fact that he could …
Mud
Out in the Haitian countryside we came upon, I guess, a mud puddle, but it was an enormous Haitian one and there was no getting around it. It was just the two of us, me and Ti-Jacques, and I remember …
The World Seems to Fall Asleep But It’s a Lie (excerpts)
Storm
What he really liked most was to see the storms coming in. His house was safe and most of the villagers went there to seek shelter. Some would cry from fear and others tried to hide their sadness from …
School Nurse
I always thought I was sick. I’d turn my head toward the window where the wind chimes swayed and beneath them baskets of crayons, the teapots we couldn’t fill with tea. Just cold water, they’d tell us. There was a …
Believers
The hole appeared overnight, at least three feet deep, two feet wide, and two feet long. It was as if someone had taken a shovel and dug a grave in the backyard. That’s what it looked like, Marty thought. A …
The Lesser Peach Tree Borer
Muscular, hairy, and naked to a fault, the man and the woman gazed at one another with the dead, painted eyes of storefront mannequins. If this was love, and nobody could say otherwise with any certainty, then it was onanistic …
