Ghost Parachute

Jordan fell in love with himself every time he stepped into the hot tub. With every inch he further immersed into the water the more enamored he became. As his limbs loosened and the warmth seeped into his pores, Jordan imagined his name was spelled Jordyn with a “y,” and that he could attract the […]

We spend the summer picking kumquats from neighbors’ trees, all bare feet and little girl giggles and sun-bleached hair. We eat the kumquats peel and all (the sweetest part) and leave no trace except sticky fingers and a neighborhood of bare Nagami trees. Sometimes the senile woman raps on her window. Sometimes we give her […]

A while ago, I dreamed that I was sick. I went to the doctor, and she told me that my illness had to be cured immediately. “How?” I asked. “By removing your heart,” she said. “It’s very easy.” She gave me a knife. “After it’s out, put your heart on this tray,” she said pointing […]

The earth soaked into Lorna’s jeans as she knelt among the ruined greens. Whenever the rabbits didn’t get her lettuce, Lorna counted it a miracle. Yet each time those soft-eared felons burrowed under her chicken wire, part of her rejoiced in their victory. Something must have scared them. Buried under the trampled leaves, the rabbits […]

We decided to test it in the bathtub. It seemed like the safest option; the backyard was off-limits after last time, when Mrs. Carruthers next door called the cops on our barbie barbecue. We had seen in our history textbook how they brewed gin in a bathtub during prohibition, and those were old bathtubs. Surely […]

Some words are involuntary. They escape like a belch, like the way I tell my husband, “Normal,” when he asks about my day. Other words bury themselves in the flesh, evading, consuming, metastasizing. I lumber through the entryway to see my husband stirring a bowl of green sludge. It looks gross but, odds are, it […]