It takes a witch to make a queen’s lipstick. Hogfat, crushed ants, frozen embers, lead. Good lipsticks should burn. I, who had mixed oil and beetles and chilis into pastes and powders, had seen good people incinerated by those ocher smiles. The Queen of Algae and Urchin had asked that I squash rebellion with face […]
Who doesn’t know the formula for a fairy tale? It’s so deeply ingrained in our cultural lexicon that we naturally begin and end our modern stories with those familiar words: Once upon a time… And they all lived happily ever after. No matter the format, we love fairy tales. Fractured, retold, spiced up, or sanitized, […]
When Grandmother disappears from the nursing home, Marika is the only one who understands what’s happened. The family and staff, they wonder how and why a 96-year-old woman could walk out of her room unnoticed and disappear in the middle of the night. They whisper about dementia and Alzheimer’s. They make phone calls to the […]
Three weeks after the well ran dry, I fed a man to the hogs. The kitchen faucet drip had stopped. It had been a metronome companion, marking solitary kitchen chores, mending, morning coffee. I held the empty kettle, twisting both knobs. The tap spat, then nothing. I listened to a faint hiss where there should […]
September 2019 marks the twentieth anniversary of Jay’s decision to become a writer. His gift to you all this celebratory year is DO IT – Twelve hard lessons on learning by failing, succeeding by accident, never giving up and saying FXXK WRITING all at the same time. You’re welcome! • • • Analogies are illustrative […]
The house is derelict and crumbling now. Its sugar-pane windows stare blindly through the cataracts of cobwebs, and damp patches blossom like liver spots across its gingerbread gables. But Hansel’s hand still trembles as he pushes open the twice-cooked door, which wobbles like a rotten tooth in its warped candy-cane frame. The last time he […]