Fiction

Molly’s pas de chat is born of force, timing, and intensity. A blink of respite at the pinnacle of the leap, when chaos slips into calm. A gentle return to plywood. She rotates her heel, chafing against her too-small slipper. Works her turn from the back leg.

I was not allowed to answer the telephone. Unless, of course, I’d been told to, or, in the very off chance no one was...

I often find myself thinking about the first time. The sound and spring of it. How the unconscious, bite-sized action...

I’m finally hitting my stride after last semester’s rocky start. It was a maddening experience because everything...

Cigarette burn holes in my cardigan meant Mom kept me close. I counted them in her comforter, seared edges lined up...

It was early Valentine’s Day morning when the first one washed up dead near Bridgend. By 10am there was a crowd around...

I want a yoga instructor with boobs. Real boobs, not those piss-poor B cups; not even C or D will do, although that’s progress …

It happened during the sweltering summer that they lived out of town, the summer of the white Ford station wagon’s inevitable demise…

The day I caught my twin sister Eliza kissing Danny Quinn, I never stopped to think they had a secret. Is that how the kiss felt to her? Like she already knew they were both gay?

Betty never thought food would be important. She never thought about food at all, certainly not about cooking it. Since leaving home, she ate most meals in the way she liked best: with a book or magazine on the table…

Date entry: Sunday, July 12, 1970
I’m coping by writing these notes. I got the idea from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground that was assigned in my AP English class during my last semester of high school.

It’s easy to get used to certain things, like aching shoulders and a sense of floating outside your life, looking down…