Six months pregnant, and I should have been happy. Six words to fire me, and I should have been angry. Instead, I drifted in a fugue. Spring faded, summer swelled, and our lives were falling apart. “I’m hungry,” you said. “I’m hot,” I answered. So we went for ice cream. June heat, dirty pavements, crowded […]
A beautiful woman robed all in white, lips red as rubies, followed the young, pale-skinned priest as he walked though the forest. The priest knew she was a yakshi, a demon that tore men’s throats out and drank their blood to quench her thirst. She was said to live atop a palm tree. When darkness […]
The hard truth is that everything is fleeting and control is often an illusion and we tend to make art to obliterate our own sense of mortality so that perhaps we will in some fashion endure beyond our bones. Some built pyramids on the graves of their workers. Some wrote poetry locked in an asylum. […]
He climbs the spiraling stairs. Bowtie dangling from his fist, he climbs and sits atop the castle wall, where the torch-dotted city folds to dark shapes. Below, vastness, empty, as he feels sitting here. His feet are heavy, pulling downward. He doesn’t need to fall to crack into a million pieces. At tonight’s wedding, he […]
In the cool of the morning, I walk between my rows of peppers, brushing my fingers against the glossy leaves of Anaheims, Brazilian Starfishes, and Carolina Reapers. I grow peppers the way my mother and grandmother before me did—I grow them for the dead. Grandma taught me about peppers, how they gather up the anguish […]