This little girl, who has no right to remind you of yourself, stands whining by the terrarium with grubby fingers smearing the glass. Grubby, you think, not to mean dirty or soiled but instead as a term of relative comparison to denote resemblance to a grub. You have not yet chosen the week’s vocabulary words […]

The rain drives so hard that Nick imagines it puncturing the roof of the Saab. He peers through the wiper blades swatting at the windshield and rechecks the gas level. The Texaco shouldn’t be much farther. Just beyond the McDonalds and that bail bonds place. If only they could get through this intersection. He’s lost […]

Singularity In 1993, mathematician Vernor Vinge warned against the coming technological ‘singularity,’ an event he predicted would occur between 2005 and 2030. The event: basically, robots take over the world. Vinge felt ambivalent and said more or less this: The robots are coming, the robots are coming, the robots are almost here. I am excited […]

It was the night of the Worm Moon, low and full in the March sky, though we couldn’t see it, not under our wool blanket of clouds. You were standing at the counter cutting vegetables when I offered you two paper cranes — folded triangles   … [Click here to purchase a copy of the […]

The way my mother tells it, I ran away. She didn’t shove me out the front door at sixteen. Afterwards, she remembers my little sister possessed by a poisonous anger but has no recollection of dragging her through the house by her hair. The history of our family was oral, repeated to herself in the […]

Sword in the bonestone. Blade rhumb lining the tongue. I was really sick but didn’t know it. One by one the acupuncturist tlcks out the rostrum-like pins—forehead cheeks chin—save for the splinter embedded in the meridian of my soft spot, crown of the governing vessel. Monster irresistible like the rhinoceros. Spiny spiky anteater. Hedgehog cousin. […]

When the sea breeze makes its way inland through all of the cranes & concrete forms of downtown, past the new floor-to-ceiling windows, & in amongst the suburbs’ shadow box fences, I watch the palm fronds behind my computer monitor alternate between a mild daze-like sway & orgasmic tremble. Sometimes I fantasize about what a […]

Rub her tiny protruded belly in circles and the sin will crawl out, fill a room like prayer. Her first word is mine. Do not let her use your heart as a tool. You cannot take body from her. You must keep her alive, let her fatten up like a little disaster. Under her coiled […]

What lives in the laboratory of the body was cradled in someone’s hand Look, they said and the thing wet, translucent, glowing, pulsed like the inside of a firefly essential inner matter, vital, alive in someone’s hand in a hallway

The [ ] you threw away climbs out of the trash, metaphor or not, crawls across the kitchen floor, makes its way outside, boards a bus, finds a pawn shop, … [Click here to purchase a copy of the magazine]

The room is your own, but it is still bare. It has to be furnished; it has to be decorated; it has to be shared. -Virginia Woolf   The day after we take possession of the house, I find two bats mummified in the basement, a mother and, perhaps, her child. They live   in […]

  FADE IN: INT. APARTMENT – DAY A young woman who has already lived a difficult life, PHOEBE sits on one of two stools at the lounging counter separating her small galley kitchen from the main room of the apartment. There is a plastic cup in front of her along with a fifth of vodka. […]

A Ten-Minute Comedy Characters Nic, Any Age or Gender Olive, 40’s – 70’s, Female Setting: The Audience, Right Before the Curtain Goes Up   “I pray you.” ~ William Shakespeare   (A theater. NIC is seated in the audience. OLIVE approaches NIC. OLIVE seems hesitant. She looks around, and then –cautiously– sits next to NIC. […]

The core labor of my writing life is the process of coaxing characters into the world of my fiction. It’s a process analogous to a portrait painter working for that crucial moment, as Paul Klee described it, where the free inspiration of the artist must yield to the demands of the thing coming into being: […]