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What I Remember of Petersburg
1. The fog, first. 2. The way the bus from Pulkovo Airport pierced the heavy veil as we were taken to the dormitories. 3. How, on that drive my first night, there was darkness and density all around. I never could quite see through. 4. How it was 2018 and winter when I arrived. That […]
How to Die in a Massacre on the American Frontier:
Based on the story of my ancestors, the Jacob Hochstetler family, and the massacre of 1757 Return good for evil. First, choose well your land: beautiful, tillable soil deep in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where “perhaps not a tree or bush had previously been removed,” where later skulking savage shadows will linger at the edge of […]
TIMELINE OF DISAPPEARANCES
age 24 Sat at your dying grandmother’s bedside, you paint her nails. A soft mauve, grey-tinged, almost like her skin now collapsing into her chest, like a slow-rotting plum, just two weeks after Mother’s Day, when she didn’t answer your call. You had never imagined this, kissing the mole of her left hand just at […]
Seven Ways to Slake Your Thirst
Maybe you’re ten years old and manning a lemonade stand with your best friend. You’re wearing a rectangle-shaped lavender sundress you love that will not fit by next summer, because you’re at that age when growth is suddenly relentless and in all the wrong directions. Did you lug your boom box—one of your prized grown-up possessions—to the corner to liven up the scene, turn […]
The Whale of You
I see you in my dreams. The whale of you swallows me whole. It sings its mournful songs into the unending blue. I reach for you. Don’t go. But you become nothing more than a speck, disappearing into the waves of time. *It was raining in Hokkaido, and the tarmac was slick. In the airport, […]
Bonnie and Regina Say Goodbye to Hope
Characters REGINA, late teens Mother to a four-week-old baby. Petulant, sarcastic, deliberate, an avid reader. She’s a smart kid. BONNIE, early 30s Regina’s aunt. Sanctimonious, judgmental, short-tempered, not an avid reader. Life has been unkind to her. Setting A small kitchen in a small house in a small town in the hot-and-humid Florida panhandle, somewhere between Gainesville and […]