Ghost Parachute

If I were a rental wife in Japan, my husband would be a salaryman with pants that needed hemming. They would droop around his heels. When we met for dinner, he would smile when he saw me, always smile, pull out the chair for me to sit. I know you like gentlemen. He’d say this […]

When the boy wakes up in the morning, the witch is there, watching him. Her shadow is gunmetal black in the doorframe. She is mossy and putrid, the color of something rotten. “Go eat your breakfast,” the witch says. “I bet there’s poison in it,” the boy says, staying under the covers, safe in his […]

Checked the time. Checked the weather and hourly forecast, to see what might come of the rain. Looked up a film, to see what year it had been, and the lead, to see what she had been doing professionally in the years since. Took a picture of my face. Took another. Another. A fourth. Looked […]

Back when Florida was still habitable, my Grandmother lived in an assisted living center on the tip of a peninsula. Whenever the Grid failed, the sky glowed with generators, but in her youth, Granny had climbed Mount Shasta and seen darkness. I imagined this darkness as a closet, a celestial blindfold with stars like the […]

Brand Pillar 1: Keep the Party Going. The Brand Ambassador stares into the toilet bowl—the familiar third-stall-from-the-right toilet bowl. Her knees throb mercilessly on the cold tile. Body trembling, she counts down from ten. Then in one deft, practiced motion, she presses her index finger to the back of her throat. Bile rains down in […]

You rise from the horizontal on the sun-lounger and hold your unclasped bikini to your chest. Your skin glitters with oil. I can’t see the expression on your face behind sunglasses but I know you’re thinking of something to say, something to split the over-ripe quiet. I continue with my slow lengths of the swimming […]