Stories

I do not want to fall prey to the bewitchment of my mind by language.

When I dream of lovers, I rarely see faces. It’s better if we never touch.

You can learn to exhale. Let the marrow of dusk leak onto your knees. Tongues rattling, we are scared into daughters again & again. The act of silence: heavy as rain. Heavy enough to believe in.

Our bed a garden of the littlest sighs of our waking. Our room, abstract.

I know you want your mother’s dial tone like you want a KFC box.

Let me stay here, in the thick of the sweetness, just a moment longer.

It was the same God who told him to get the hell out of Arkansas.

I lift my wine flask, drunk with rivers and hills.

A strange odd lost duck day all over—sunrise with a honed edge.

He is not a man, but an empty shell, a creature who laughs to stop the shame.

I hadn’t always liked being around my mother while she was alive.

Tobacco and dirty wool, rank alcoholic sweat. I liked him right away.

Please, Theresa thought, as a tenderness surged within herself.

I can’t talk yet. But I know things. I will tell you all this later when I can.

Ah, yes, Rita reminded herself: I won. Her Mistress of Mayhem award.

We hung our posters at the drugstore, at the grocery, at city hall. I tacked up a 1970s Earth Day poster from my mother’s classroom. We tie-dyed shirts, and I bought everyone a plastic visor to paint.

I believed in department stores the way I believed in Germany.

For a moment I couldn’t tell whether he was a person or a ghost.

A Good Samaritan refused is no more good than any Bad Samaritan.

Keely finally stops crying when they step outside. The shock of cold.

We imagined the train routes through the heart of the country.

I lost my medicine bag from back when I believed in magic.

Your image is on my credit card, you and the old red, white, and blue.

I wouldn’t sleep a second, knowing the catastrophe I’d set in motion.

I commute to war five days a week in a station wagon the color of an egg.

He was a gifted conversationalist; he could talk rain down out of clouds.

I opened my eyes and they burned; I closed them and saw my father.