We moved out of the city and into the yawning expanse of the suburbs a few days after my twenty-fifth birthday. My fiance, always one to guzzle the clear poison of mouth-numbing optimism, barely lamented the loss of our diverse Brooklyn neighborhood. Although I’d been raised in the nondescript and cloistered confines of small-town America, I knew that I would miss the liberation of anonymity. Walking the streets without feeling like a sloppy spectacle. Engaged…
Part II of a two-part series. Part I can be found here. Except sometimes, lately—like tonight, with Pearls squirming underneath you, tears streaming sideways down her face and into her flushing ears as she whimpers against the palm of your hand—the word creeps up the back of your throat, and you have to choke it back with something else, something to remind both of you who’s in charge here. So you backhand her hard…
Part One of a two-part series. 1. Winter Solstice So you’re this person in a park. Can that be all, for now? People are always trying to figure out what kind of person you are, like you’re not a real person until they know how long you’ve been alive and where your parents are and your name, no, your real name, and whatever the fuck is between your legs. Why can’t you just be a…
“You’ve been away too long.” My mother’s voice is a honey-thick purr and I am sitting cross-legged on my unmade twin-sized bed, the sheets in dire need of an industrial washing (beating). The pillows are suffused with cigarette smoke, a cheap brand that makes my lungs throb like a sputtering heart on a cold operating tray, unfiltered tobacco and nicotine that make my hands shake. I don’t even know why I took up smoking again.
Letty Matapang. Sigh. I wanted to write her name all over the covers of my notebooks like I did in first grade about Consuela Lopez (Consuela + Marisela 4ever), but I don’t have notebooks anymore, so I wrote it a couple of times in the back of a library book instead. Slowly, smoothly, with my eyes closed. Letty, Letty, Letty. Names are magic, you know. Usually knowing someone’s name gives you power over them,
Winter had set in, which meant that for a good six months Stacy had constant fantasies of lighting her house on fire and moving to Florida. One nice thing about winter was that it inspired Les to make his famous omelets. He'd promised her a nice big batch for breakfast tomorrow, and she'd picked up some fresh eggs at the store to make sure she had enough. She finished putting away the cereal, the cans…
You're on your third magazine when the doorbell rings – one of those glossy, absolutely fucking worthless collections of ten dollar shirts, overpriced meats, and knockoff game consoles. It's the second time you've looked through the stack on your kitchen table, driven to desperation as you are by a birthday two weeks away. “Anything's fine,” he keeps saying, “I'm not picky.” That asshole. God damn him. You worry at your wedding ring and get up,…
All the astronomers are busy all the time. They have excuses: ‘Oh, I’m at a conference’; ‘Oh, I’m writing a research paper.’ Actually they are all in a secret knitting club for astronomers. They’re making a giant representation of the cosmos, a scale model. They have to knit fast because the universe is rushing away from itself. They argue about the proper way to render black holes in yarn. Derek specializes in nebulae; Megan details asteroids. They’re making this…
They say a witch lives over on Elm, right on the corner in an old house that's sort of fallen down between two towering oak trees. They say her lawn's green and lush because of deals she's made with the chattering squirrels that bound along its expanse with no fear of the blackbirds perched on her home's roof. They say the rhododendron bushes flanking the house's front steps will laugh and twitch and watch if…
This post was brought to you by Samk12345. “You don’t look your age,” he says. I know his type. He’s not one of those newly minted millionaires, the kind that slides into the bar decked out in the season’s latest Brooks Brothers, throwing around his plastic like he’s an elite member of an underground society. He looks like a gentleman, a carefully curated image, wrist adorned with one purposefully selected piece of expensive jewelry.
December 3, 1649 A footman in an ugly coat enters the embassy, hands Pierre a note, bows clumsily. Mr. Ambassador, he says. Pierre opens it. Rene, tomorrow it will begin, he tells me. I nod. No, he says, I mean it, no more delays. I nod again. I do not know if I am failing to show enthusiasm to prick at Pierre, a toadstool of a man, albeit my friend, or because I lack enthusiasm,…
She peels back the plastic and gets out of the water, a little clumsy with her limbs not moving right and her blue-black blood slow shot through them. She hasn’t even opened her eyes yet, they’ve been closed that long she has to pry them with thick fingers, prop them open a while, practice her blinks. Her eyes see well, and if there were anyone here, they’d see eyes of a glorious brightness, clear like…
Previously by Vanessa Willoughby: Lost and Found. I could still smell the bleach beneath my nails long after I’d washed my hands. The apartment had been adequately cleaned a few days earlier, but sometimes the cheapest form of therapy for me did not involve downing tequila shots, as my nicotine-fiend boyfriend would like to believe, but busting open a new pack of sponges and a bucket of bleach. I typically began my power-hour washing…
The summer we lost the dog was the summer that we lost Joey. It seems somewhat misleading, even crude to say that we lost the dog because to lose something implies that you noticed when it was gone and to say that I lost Joey would be simplification, an attempt to beautify a carrion. We lost the dog that summer because my father was tired of looking out for another life. We lost Joey because…
There are twelve-hundred-and-fifty-seven ways to kill a woman. There are only twelve-hundred-and-one ways to kill a man. I made the lists separately and then typed them up and merged the Word documents in the Computer Lab, so those numbers are verifiable. I also sorted the tactics into categories—sneaky, particularly gruesome, ritualistic, biblical, and so on—and then I made a very large Venn diagram one night when everyone else was at Rodeo Round-up, and I looked…
