Ghost Parachute

Adeline in the next room while you’re packing your bags, snorting something with the trash asshole who sold it to her. Glasses of whiskey clink, blending with the sounds of laughter and raindrops lightly plinking the window. Whiskey. Even though her stomach is so bloated she looks pregnant. This is called ascites. The pressure is […]

I heard her head came clean off. Because it’s not enough a girl our age is dead. Not enough her mother found her hanging from the ceiling fan in the game room. Tina has to make it extra. It did, she insists. Because her body was so heavy. From the … you know. We knew. […]

In my school was this girl, Mary Theresa. She had what’s called prosthetic legs, which means they’re not real and they can come off. That’s what the nuns told us the day before she started school. And boy were they right. Mary Theresa’s big trick at recess was to get swinging extremely high. I mean […]

She sings to me at night, her siren song.  Don’t you remember? Oh, Estelle, Estelle. How could I forget? My identical womb-mate. I recall how I twisted my body to wrap the umbilical cord twice around your little neck. Our mother gave birth to one screaming baby and one little corpse. I don’t like sharing. […]

When I got up to leave, Death looked sad, and when I went back a few weeks later, he was sitting in the very same spot. I said, “Hey Stranger,” but he didn’t seem to remember me from before. I wondered if it was my hair, how the tendrils now curled like Fiddlehead ferns from […]

Because maternity wards smell like dorm bathroom bins when all the girls are taken by their periods and everyone is too tired and too annoyed to empty messes into dumpsters. Because birth and death share a scent. Because everything is too bright, too white, too stark: lights, walls, sheets. Because blood and sweat and urine […]