I try to keep pressure on the bullet wound but blood still leaks out between my fingers. It’s a deep red against my green scales. I don’t know if I hit that damn bug, Renny. But he hit me. It’s been quiet for a minute or two, or ten. I think I’m in shock; staring […]
You are not the son your parents hoped for. Your father is a minister. Your mother is a would-be Olympic skater, a famous local beauty who blew out her knee at the age of 17. They wanted a son to be proud of, a confident son with friends and followers, a clever son who could […]
A week before Christmas, my father left the milk jar for me to skim off the fog-colored fat. I found his boot prints in the ice kicked out of the goats’ water pan. The machine in the barn had also disappeared. My mother searched his things and found little missing: his graphing calculator, his […]
A honeybee fluttered its wings for the last time. It was the last honeybee, a sickly man-made clone descended from a tragically short line of sickly man-made clones. Its stunted wings were translucent and crisscrossed with veins. The blackish yellow fur on its thorax reminded me of the ducklings I saw at the zoo when […]
Attempt 1: Talk to her. “Hi,” I say in the break room at Innovations Worldwide, though this is debatable. I might have only cleared my throat. Regardless, I am counting this as the first word I have uttered to Jennifer. She looks up from her tablet. Her green eyes sparkle in the fluorescent light. She’s […]
Daytime, must be. Birds singing outside. Too warm here, under the covers in my clothes and shoes. All the air’s gone but I won’t move because my Mum and Dad are watching from the ceiling. Floating there, blubbing. Picture perfect they are too, younger than me. Eyes wide and wet as babes’. I can’t bear […]
When it’s dark and no one would notice, we’ll break into the office. We’ll ride the elevator to the fourth floor, alternately giggling and pretending like we have serious work in an office building in the middle of the night. We’ll infiltrate like ninjas, darting from the soda machine to the water fountain to the […]
The rain fell everywhere, ruining our crops, flooding our homes, making rivers of the streets. We gathered, hundreds of us, thousands, half in hope and half because nothing else was left for us to do. I like to imagine how we looked from the tower: the crowd stretching like a turbulent and dark sea toward […]
“Change your life,” the poster says. “With one simple surgery, you can live fully in the moment. No stress, no worries, no lies.” The text is accompanied by the usual images. Smiling adults, laughing children, a couple on a sunset beach walking and holding hands. That’s all, but I pick up a brochure anyway–if nothing […]
The man who smelt of electricity was shown into the drawing room while the maid looked for Mrs Darwin. Emma Darwin was doing the household accounts but was glad to stop. The man’s card read: Andrew.J.Salt Creation Museum Petersburg, KY She bustled into the drawing room and offered her hand, Americans, she knew, being less […]