Mystic flamingo was the color of the sky outside Club Laser. Inside, the octogenarian Kilpatrick sisters wept under the red light of a neon broken heart. Trisha and Deb, Irish twins, wept nightly into their Drambuie to the pulsing excuse …
Until nightfall it was safe. It was okay to be with Anna. They could do normal things in the daytime. Anna ground flour from the good green twigs that Melissa found. Melissa was always awake at dawn. When the peach …
At last the elevator doors opened and freed the revelers, fleeing like poached parrots back into freedom, and there was a sense of emergent vengeance in the air, carefree, whistling vengeance: a car keyed or a wife fucked, a wig …
Crumpler had a tire iron and wasn’t calming down. The two of us were in the worst part of Fort Worth, searching for a rib place that sold Oxycontin out of its kitchen. It was midsummer, July, maybe August by …
We had a neighbor who was in the National Guard. Once a month he left for training, a regular schedule well-known in the community. On a weekend when he was absent, someone tried to peek at his wife. My father …
When I was six my father developed a drinking and explaining problem. He moved out on a day I remember like loud TV and my mom met and married Alan. A home needed a man and a woman, ours had …
Ah, but we knew roaches. Packed as we were into our leaning apartment buildings—those brick tenements stretching twenty stories high, where the higher you were the harder it was for water to build up pressure in your leaky pipes, and …
Her letter arrived by post in the afternoon last week. She carried it now and was in a black car, the letter in her hands, in a fuckinggoddamnUBER, arriving in the old neighborhood with her luggage. Her nails perfectly lemon. …
This city was constructed using most cutting edge science, with the most expensive materials. Then, this meant glass—salt, rock, silica, the heat of a kiln. Today we call this vitrification, but the early architects thought of it as a kind …
I. Composing an email to him that I will not send: William, I would save the buttons that come in those tiny plastic bags attached to your new dress shirts. Take pleasure in releasing the pins from the collar and …
The next evening she put some thought into her outfit for a change. After tearing apart her closet, she settled on a black silk muumuu embroidered with a life-sized silver crane. The crane looked as though it was pecking her …
I get up in the middle of the night and pee on things. Not sleep walking, sleep peeing. This is a problem. I also have a short temper, but this is another problem for another day. First we thought it …