Before her students arrive Kayla spends several minutes at the blackboard dotting her i’s and grinding the chalk for periods to end her sentences. She wants the instructions clear. She unhinges the classroom’s large window and runs a nylon string from wall to wall. She dangles small chunks of rabbit meat across its length. When…

When the president died, they put his chair by the dumpster in the alley. That made no sense to me, on account of it was in the office for so long. I took the chair back up to the office and left it there, but then someone hauled it down to the alley again. When…

Translated by Ramon Glazov “Man of wit. Everything’s legit.” —J. Buridan + [From a home encyclopedia in the year 3000:] Topic: ART or DEPICTION “A phenomenon born with man, but extinguished before him with the murder of Pope Benedict XVI on February 25, 1995” (ref: Goldsmith, Dies Irae, Dies Illa — Global Library). It comprised…

It begins in the middle of her back — an itch in the space between her shoulders, something alive. She shifts against the worn-smooth cotton until she slips onto the cool space where her ex-husband used to sleep. He was neat and orderly, the sort of person who didn’t like to talk in hypotheticals. If…

The sound shakes the dining table. The forks and knives rattle against each other and the milk sloshes in the children’s half-empty tumblers. The plastic pears I stacked just like in the Pinterest pictures, twined with fairy lights in a cut glass tray, tumble and roll. I stand up and pull back the curtain. “Something…

I sit on a plastic seat by the motel pool, my skin turning red. Above, palm trees sway in the hot breeze and offer little shade. I long to be in the water. A lady steps out of the pool, shakes her gypsy-dark hair, and sprinkles coolness on my thirsty skin. “Little girl!” Her bikini…

My grandma likes to buy me lingerie. When I get the free time and Ben is busy, I visit her and we go shopping so she can buy me a new see-through nightgown. Aunt Mary comes with us sometimes. Aunt Mary, who has no breasts from her mastectomy, picks out bras for me to try…

On her daily adventures she collected things — sweet wrappers she found on the side of the road, discarded pins from a museum visit, poorly developed photographs, chewed up library pencils. At home, she laid them out on the bed, considering them clues to the nation’s psyche while they floated on a sea of white…

The café is crowded, so the ellipsis is easy to spot. Paused right in the middle of someone’s sentence. Mid-air as a bird. + Blind Date with End Stop The end stop is a fabulous conversationalist. She drinks her red wine in one flushing gulp. She steps down strongly with the point of her heel.…

“I have a theory,” she said on their first date, which was at an Indian restaurant where the music was a lovely singsong but the chef seemed enraged as he clapped a ball of dough between his hands, then threw it into the flames. And her date, whom she would never see again, who would…

I watched her transform by the sink over years and years. Black hair turning silver. Skin wrinkling. Fingers bending from arthritis. “These dishes take forever,” she would say. Night after night, with an almost religious devotion, she stood at the sink in front of the window and cleaned the dishes, scrubbing and drying until they…

On her thirteenth birthday, Susannah pledged herself to the moon. She grew up taller than a sunflower, spoke fluent cacti, trained snakes, and won every spitting contest on the continent. The collection of grandmothers she lived with warned her to never forget that men are only men and to always hold her breath while passing…