Crow

Our house, lakeside and lofty and a soft dove-grey; a prime nesting location for the area’s birds. My mother, who loved them, would never allow us to move a nest, not even that of the crow who flew in our window and began to nest on our kitchen table. The kitchen was unusable until the eggs hatched, so we ate every night in the dining room on an enormous mahogany table my mother had salvaged from a downsizing convent: deep dark lustrous wood that whispered hymns and incense....

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World's End

By noon, everyone knew we had less than ten hours to live. It was frightening. Not just because the world was ending, though that was enough. Our fear was compounded by the knowledge itself, which had seemed to arise out of nothing, untraceable. It had no origin, no solid foundation, and yet everyone knew; we saw confirmation wherever we looked. The sky seemed lit from beneath. The birds were silent. The air was full of strange silent energy, a subtle electric charge I’d never felt before. And on every corner one could see some number of people, couples...

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Environmental Theory

I. My fellow Americans: We are no strangers to war. Your patience grows thin. Drugs, Terror, Afghanistan. Progress seems impossible. What happened to wars we could win? I tell you, we do not know whom we fight. I tell you truly, we do not know our enemy. We do not see what stands before us, chopping away at our territories, taking the lives of our children. We do not see the force that has plotted against us from the beginning of time. I say to you, we are fighting the wrong war. II. I wish to propose, very simply, war against that which causes...

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A Demented Waltz with Dead Russian Officials

How you play is you can either choose a Russian official or a dead author. Everyone wants to be an official because it’s more exciting. Usually Ivan the Terrible gets picked first, and then Rasputin, then Lenin and Stalin and all the more recent ones, and if you go down the row and people start running out of Russian officials they know about, or if they named one that didn’t exist, they can be either a boyar or a bureaucrat and they have to stand on the other side of the room. The kids who have been playing for the longest usually aren’t boyars because...

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8:00 PM

At this moment I prefer nothing to wrapping my arms about her in the dark while her nightlight shines shadows on the ceiling between the ghosts of stick-on stars. There is something delicious about a Beethoven piano sonata punctuated by slow, small, sleepy breaths....

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On Pronouns

She cries nebulas, every sob is something enormous and hazy and vaguely spherical, that’s how I know things aren’t going to be okay, and also she starts apologizing a lot, like “I’m sorry, I’m okay, really,” like it’s all absolute bullshit and we both know it but she feels the need to say it anyway, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry” and I’m like “No really it’s okay” and then “Why are you apologizing” and then “Damn it I don’t actually care that you’re crying, like do you think this is going to ruin my day because really it isn’t, I mean it’s actually kind...

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One night, in this very house, a child was born dead. A man stared out of his window while his wife screamed. That was the first time snow fell on this town. A stillborn waterbaby lies between his mother’s legs; the midwife slices the umbilical cord with a washed knife. The mother screams. The bedsheets are red, but her blood can still be seen dark and glistening against saffron. The sheets are drenched. It was a bloody birth. The midwife hums a song from her childhood she remembers out of nowhere as she calmly rinses off the small corpse; the man stares...

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We got lost in the labyrinth at three in the morning. Wandered in, looked around, tried to wander out but, guess what, there is no way out of the labyrinth at three in the morning. When you get to the center you can sleep; until then you just wander and wander and wander till your feet ache and your legs burn and you cramp up everywhere and want to double over but three in the morning labyrinths are powerful and invasive and they loop in and around you till you hardly know what’s you and what’s alien and your entire body feels like a wound or a mistake and...

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After a while you learn to tell when colors are pretending. You’ll see them everywhere: violent streaks of amethyst, lustrous tongues of jade looking like radioactive angel vomit splattered against walls. Sapphire winding around itself like a mad scientist’s depiction of a double helix, writhing and thrashing and breaking apart like a many-headed hydra, strangled through its own dark and unpredictable fury but always somehow managing to rise phoenix-like from the abyss inside itself it barely manages to contain—you’ll know. You’ll see it leaking out of the...

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Rolling

“I just want a place to charge my phone,” Daniela says, standing in what seems like a cross between a bar and a warehouse, wearing a green and purple Dr. Seuss hat. Daniela is breaking out from this stress, all this stress of four in the morning and a cheetoh diet and everyone wearing strange costumes and her phone’s placid “connect charger.” Daniela’s breaking out, and she can tell when she looks in the harsh light-rimmed mirrors and sees the redness on her cheeks and the darkness under her eyes and the speckle of tiny raised bumps on her brow. Daniela’s...

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she would

if her torso weren’t hollow, if her body didn’t hang languidly so that gravity ceased to have meaning and she could not create the tension to push herself up from the earth, if she weren’t limp and loose and floating in a sea of pain, pain, pain, no sharpness, no point where knife met flesh, just a dead, dull ache at the core of her, inextricably tangled in veins and follicles so that there was nothing to fight with or against, no barrier between herself and what she w...

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Overture

Perhaps I am cursed with an exceptionally long memory. Perhaps my memory, in addition to being terrifyingly long, is also extremely precise, and this is why when I imagine my childhood I understand that there was never any innocence to be lost. Others speak of a warm, safe place—they call it home—and some being, god or parent, whom they once believed omnipotent. Then there is the Fall (I love this narrative) and they receive the knowledge that their omnipotent force never had their best interest at heart, or was itself imperfect, and that home may have been...

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