Ghost Parachute

He has neither toner nor ink but there is no message he has to keep. He only has a stack of paper, piled up, that nearly touches the ceiling, with only enough room to slip his hand between the ceiling and the top of the pile to take a sheet off cleanly. He does so […]

Every year since my mother died we hunted the wolves. All of us operating as one body, with my father at its center. We marched out in the darkness that came from the trees, carrying what weapons we kept by our doors and under our beds. I watched my father’s body become steel, his eyes […]

Mama said we had to start making smaller dinners because we’d been overeating, which was wasteful. I felt bad because even then the mound of stringy vegetables looking sad on Mama’s plate was smaller than mine. After dinner, Mama sat in the muddy light out back, blowing smoke and missing dreams into the night air, […]

Sirens, dogs barking, howling, blinding light as Liam flips the switch. He stands in your doorway, the snot plugging his nostrils still green—infection.  His medicines blockaded since the Mississippi backed up. “Where’s your mask?” Firetrucks scream up 95. Liam clutches his blankee— —exactly the way your baby brother Kevin did during thunderstorms. Someone pounds your […]

She would have been a physicist ballerina or even a ballerina physicist. If she could. In her dreams she pirouettes through galaxies, leaps through dimensions; lands with a thump on a wooden stage in a parallel universe. Bows. Geometry is the hardest Math. All sharp Picasso angles and infinite spirograph loops cut with linear equations. […]

A flash of blue in the deep, layered green of the jungle—the blue of plastic mermaid tails, of Walmart signs and birthday balloons, of everything that we’ve left behind. I catch his arm, point. “Do you see?” He pulls away from my touch, sees nothing. Soon there is nothing to see, only a dense tangle […]