Ghost Parachute

You brought the bats home the week before I left. Three furred faces wrapped in newspaper shrouds. You boiled them with garlic and ginger, and ate them with buttered white bread. I’d never seen them for real before, only in those nature docos I made you watch on Sunday nights. Their screech and squabble always […]

Lions. Tigers.  Jealousy. I watch you chatting and joking with that woman with the red hair. I know you find her attractive. She’s exactly your type. The way she’s walking ever so slightly too close to you and laughing at your corny gags tell me she likes you too. Neither of you are paying any […]

I want to be home, where no one can enter my skin. I step on the asphalt to warm my soles, but now I am exposed. Turn to look for headlights, imagine car tires crunching over my toes and feel the cracks and breaks through my whole body. Back to the grass, which itches with […]

It’s getting darker, she thinks, and yes, the light is dimmer, the trees lashing a little: a storm. She is eating an English muffin with the remains of the jam. She’d gotten up at eight, lain in the rumpled sheets for ten minutes, took a bath, lying in the cooling water. Then: plaid bathrobe, lavender […]

Once there was a girl, make that a woman, who lived in the woods, but was not lonely. She was perfectly happy, sitting inside a hollow tree painting acorns. She had many friends painting acorns alongside her, some human like herself, some wood animals who would hold acorns between their paws or hooves and clamp […]

Emily didn’t trust Uncle Simon but loved him. Her mother condemned people for their noses because as Aristotle warned, “When nostrils are great and wide, men are lustful.” Emily wasn’t sure Aristotle or mother got that shit right. She judged men by their beards. No hair, she could deal. Bristling faces hurt. Uncle Simon possessed […]