Fiction

An owl lives in the sweet gum, and tonight it has flown to our rooftop. Its calls float down to me—low and hollow—like curls of carrot peels around a bowl.…

[Image: Mathieu Croisetière by Sophie Lécuyer] Lavinia is next door. She needs you to go over there to help her take a bath. She will be impatient by now, stewing…

Victor Savic tugged the chain of his bedside lamp. Another ring. “Get it,” his wife mumbled. Victor swung his legs out from under the covers. The floor was cold. He…

Dayo looked towards the train terminal and thought of all the ways he could die right now. Jumping in front of it, or stampeded by even-toed pouch animals—let’s call them…

The president is silent. To get into office, he had launched an erratic and often unintelligible campaign—an army for space, anti-immigration, anti-plant and animal, pro-large, expensive, and medieval wall, pro-flak…

There’s one behind the house, between the stacks of empty oil drums. She can hear it mewling. More voices join in, a miniature chorus of cartoonish pitches. This is how…

[Image: “Modern Mythology” by Rebecca Rebouché] A caged parrot, fireflies, two cheating husbands. A marriage that persisted and a marriage that is perishing. I remember my mother sobbing into my…

I used to draw V-shapes on the blank page and call them birds. I liked how easy it was to start with empty sky and fill it endlessly with hundreds…

[Unnamed painting by Zdzisław Beksiński] There was a time when words mattered. But then it stopped. And nothing was left but vague gestures and misguided intentions. But then, at that…

He wakes at the same time he did the day before. Every morning he shuffles in the dark through the same choreography, first throwing the blankets off his body, then…

* * * Momma makes Bird for dinner every Sunday. Her and the afternoon spend their hours stuffing and plucking and cooking. I spend mine on the kitchen floor, blowing…

Seen from the outside, the ship floats on calm, dark waters. The ship seen from afar, far away, by an immobile and inattentive observer. The ship being viewed, but not…

I needed a reprieve from the smell of piss and ammonia, so I peeled the latex gloves off my sweaty hands and stepped outside into the heat and gazed at…

[Image Credit: “A telephone operator wears protective gauze in 1918,” Bettmann / Bettmann Archive] A woman lies on a cot on the veranda of an old plantation house, now a…