Fiction

Her sentiments maudlin, malaise dripped like a fever from her pores.

Gary Sturm

The three of us share a myth, that I’m fragile as old bones. My parents speak in low voices—about me, I’m pretty sure. I watch the waitress, trying to remember how to flirt. I take off my mask.

He pushed aside a photograph of a man with a knife stuck in his eye.

He cut down on beer and moved into the hotel that had my name.

When I think on it, I can’t believe I’m going to kill two people over weed.

The golden-haired ones, they think they’re better than Virgin Mary.

“Hey, you look lost,” the hunter had said. “You better come with me.”

The boys searched for their father, lost somewhere in the Olympic Range.

She wonders if he will be all right. She assumes he has four-wheel drive.

You never see Westerners, so you don’t think of them as human beings.

He didn’t mind, he insisted, that he loved her more than she loved him.

Somebody would be a lot happier if she were more like her mother.

Spanish men. They whispered and whistled. It made her jumpy.

Say what you will, a human being has the right to their own body.

He was ready to move on, to touch his patients, to cut them open.

Owen’s head throbbed, his ears ached, and an anvil sat on his chest.

My mother and I remained apart. My father came late to the party.

She asked, “What’s the weirdest thing you can do with your body?”

How do our lives disappear even while we’re in the midst of them?

She began to see the word, or traces of it, wherever she went.

Sister Barbara folded her arms like a forbearing husband.

Who was responsible for my father not living up to expectations?

What’s the harm? Will you fight even the healing powers of love?

She’d seen snakes before, but she’d never really looked at one, until now.

Where my mom was wasn’t never far from the Myrtle Beach Days Inn.

His mother wasn’t there to meet him at his stop. She never was.

Our ambition was a clawing, grasping thing. It got us out of bed.

They are glorious pumpkin-skinned messengers. I hate them.

The cat was looking at me with an intelligent expression. It knew.