Stories

You almost never know different so you make a language of it: chitter, glissando, trill.

Like superstitious sports fans, we played the song night after night. Since giving birth I’d become hyperaware of death.

His spirit shone fiercely, shaming the chasm by illuminating it.

My days pass through me as music through a thin, stretched wire.

Her girlish hand the color of rich vanilla floating over the flotsam.

Her anger was white and cold. It sent seams of ice through my heart.

Kay Whitaker

My new car cost more than my dad’s first house; I Googled it.

She was here. She could not go on. It was the end—the end of the world.

Her knees seemed about to give way, and he quickly grabbed her elbow.

Hard to know what a prisoner believes, what the guard presumes.

Another disposable medical mask drying in the June sun after all the ceremonies are done Looks for a second like a lip snarling in that flirting way you see the tattooed girls snarl

The air, forced through her throat’s reed, broke with a play of notes.

They rise in waves, while a lone hawk remains unperturbed.

There was a ladder planted dead center in a field of high, thin grass.

Our grandmothers were bakers and nurses, spies and traitors.

The night before my mother’s double mastectomy, we went skinny-dipping.

You are home in your bed like a soft animal with really intense feelers.

I wonder why I feel bound to the gray-dry skin of you, the barrenness of feet.

I will fear no evil, for I’m the meanest son of a bitch in the valley.

Walking on Canal Street, I slipped on the curb and fell on my face.

All of those feelings—you do not have them, they have you.

A scene from the night before comes rushing forward like a dream.

These days, I am less of an irony detector and more of a lyrical drone.

you cut through brush with the iron edge you push before you

He loathed them most, despising their desire to get on with things.

Brod stopped her before she could fling the latte in Marcella’s face.