Ghost Parachute

You slide behind Jackson’s desk. It’s after five and everyone’s gone. You call your husband from Jackson’s phone. Don’t forget to dial 9. You tell your husband you forgot to defrost and can he pick up a pizza? Jackson’s desk is at the far end of the huge open office, sad little cubicle near Stairway […]

Roland showed her photos, images of her taken through a stained window, reclining on cushions and eating grapes, she zipped up her jacket and a backdraft from a departing train filled the platform, and all her reasons for staying backed up in her throat, and she pelted him with a round of sorrys that fell […]

Seventy-two hours. That was how long it usually took for a family to gather enough funds to pay us. It was always the same routine. They’d cry over the phone while we threatened bodily harm to their parents, children, and lovers. “Please, don’t hurt them. We’ll give you however much you want.” But we never […]

We don’t touch, we never do anymore. The mattress might as well be an island, a continent, a sea where it’s only safe to float, because the air—spiced and hot—is what holds us in place, what condenses us. After the accident and so many surgeries, we can still breathe, but the fire left our skin […]

“…are not opinions, are not lies, are not fictions,” said my sixth grade teacher Mrs. Anderson. “Take history, for example. The things we learn in history are facts.” The Magna Carta was signed in 1215. George Washington was the first president of the United States. Teddy Roosevelt said something about a big stick. These were […]

Rivka’s sister, Shira, is twenty-seven and somewhere upstate. On the other side of the bars, guards are treating her like a sideshow act, gawking, and whispering, and weary but curious. The warden passes her last meal through the steel bars, and she keeps her eyes lowered as she receives the tray. “Potato pancakes. Enjoy,” the […]