Ghost Parachute

We never asked about Lorelei’s past though origin stories abounded. Her father had an adventure while fishing. Her mother was a mail order bride from the sea. Her aunt found her in a bucket of chum. She rolled around the halls of our high school in a bright copper tank. There was an ongoing raffle […]

1. Dominic is digging his holes again, searching. His fortune, he says, he buried it out here in this sun-beaten sea of sand and sage. It was at the foot of the cottonwood along the wash, where the rain ran thin like veins—and then the flood. Or it was under the skull-shaped rock on the […]

“What kind of name is Jerzy with a ‘z’ anyway?” “He was named for that writer, from the 60s. His parents were unconventional, I guess.” Kel leaned back in the lawn chair and held up her hand against the sun. My two-year-old explored the bug world in the coarse Florida grass. We were doing what […]

I can’t tell if my dog loves or hates the bones. She finds them wherever we go. A bone in the parking lot. A bone under the mesquite tree. She finds bones where bones don’t belong. A bone in my backpack. A bone under the passenger’s seat of my car. A bone under the covers […]

i. After her father dies, Reva immerses herself in temp work. It lets her start over every few weeks, just when that itch settles under her skin, deep within her gut. She struggles to find a balance between the stability she craves and the restlessness in her blood. For a while, every temp job is […]

The Undertaker beats my wife again. She’s still up in what she’s claimed as her art studio when we bought this house a year ago. She glued sequins and buttons all over the walls, but has spent most of her hours in there playing a game in a chat room. She’s abandoned her button art […]

Love may be the most powerful thing on earth, but it could not stop the men who took Caleb and his mother.  Cato chased the van and then the cloud of dust until all he could see was dry road and dead scrub. It was the summer of fire and the smoke curled the scent […]

The suspension bridge tries to catch us in its wires as we drive from Bristol to Wales, chasing storm clouds as we go. “It’s like a spider with a gazillion legs,” Sam says, staring up through the sun roof. I can’t help but smile at him. In those words I hear the little boy he […]

Like toast that falls jelly side down or the chemical compounds in effervescent streams of diet-diet drinks, you do not nourish me. Together we are plastic fast food containers that bubble out of their shape when microwaved. Intensity erodes our forms, anything contained inside us soapsuds out.    It’s a sad sort of magic how […]