There’s nothing lonelier than breakfast on a broken heart, so Yuri’d gone to work hungry. A real starving artist, just like that asshole Stepan had wanted. Only now, standing in the middle of the forest outside Moscow State, dressed as …
Fiction
Paula Cole’s 2 AM Walgreens Apology
The 24-hour pharmacy line is too long, wavy drunk, so Paula Cole stares at the carpet (which isn’t gray but also somehow definitely is) when it comes on, her most successful song—a banger, really. In drops the string of do-do-do, …
Cake
The baby was sleeping when the front door slid open. Rachel was in the kitchen baking a cake, rummaging in the cupboards for icing sugar. She caught the movement out of the corner of her eye and when she turned, …
The Lady Baguette
She didn’t mind, she told me– to nourish, to sustain– this is the role of the mother, and how the body is made. Women who become mothers nurse their children, and mothers who become baguettes nurse the world. Should I …
Love Is a Piano Dropped from a Fourth Story Window
Nathan is spending his thirtieth birthday alone in a diner. Alone unless you count the pretty, distracted woman in glasses—the only other patron—sitting several booths down. And he does. Nathan leafs through a menu he knows well, stealing glances as …
GOOD LUCK, SWEET ORIENTAL BOY
Before I got lost in that big porno theater on Astoria, my therapist told me how his husband wasn’t really his husband. He said that his husband had been a friend who’d been terminally ill and that his literal dying …
The Bridge Kids
Salamander kneels in the mud puddle. Both knees caked now in the cold mess but he closes his eyes and smiles that big-ass smile. Master Jam’s yellow bat taps each of his shoulders and Salamander says, “I will never betray …
Frog Woman
She stands ankle-deep in the wood chips of the playground at Library Park—merry-go-round, whirlwind seats, the usual. She looks up at the sky, all that gunmetal gray. Then she shouts, HEY YOU MOTHERFUCKERS!
Most of the children were …
The Two Girls
They do not know that girls become teenagers become girls again. That girl, this girl. Charlie, Fatima. Girls who smoke fake cigarettes in attics and then real cigarettes on porches. Girls who cut Barbie hair and then real hair, who …
Reaching for Ijenu
Maria, a woman from my age grade, takes the condolence messages on my behalf, and makes sure that everyone eats kola and has something chilled to drink.
“She is resting.” Her voice confronts someone who must have been making their …
