“Lydia fantasized that Paul might bend her over the kitchen sink and rip open her blouse, scattering little pearl buttons across the linoleum. He would splash dishwater on her breasts with one hand as he hitched up her skirt with the other. Or maybe they would both be in the laundry room. Paul would lift […]

“The next afternoon, she was side-lying in her bed, nursing Stanley while trying to read a McSweeney’s piece on her phone. It was amusing, but her mind kept wandering to yesterday. That mom who kept humming to herself. That baby girl who Meredith could have sworn levitated for just a hot second while reaching for the […]

“She felt very light-headed, and her thighs were trembling as she handed the scissors off to the first guest in line. She crumpled into a folding chair and sat beside Yossi as each person took their turn at his head, dropping coins or stuffing tightly folded bills into the tzedakah box he balanced on his […]

My new fiction is the finale story for this past month’s Weird Love feature on the Barrelhouse blog. “Sheila was startled when Walter slipped his hand down the front of her Levi’s. It was not what she was expecting in broad daylight, at a church picnic. His hand was a warm dry octopus in her […]

“On a Thursday afternoon in March, after a lively morning of scrubbing congealed dog vomit from the kitchen floor, incinerating two consecutive batches of banana pancakes, powering through a potty-training fiasco of epic magnitude, and listening to her four-year-old daughter’s earnest yet harrowing rendition of Let It Go at least a dozen times, Rita lost […]

“It was some kind of turbulence, a shiver in the air. A disturbance, like a heat wave rising off of blacktop on a scorching day, except it was cold then, brutally cold. Bird was wearing his little green parka over his requisite fleecy dinosaur jammies, and a thick red wool cap over his long wisps […]

My story, one of four finalists for the Highlander Fiction Award, is live at RJ today! “Every fairy tale starts with a dead mother. June’s folks weren’t the kind to bother with keeping books around the house, but she had learned that much. The few storybooks she did have were fairy tales that she’d read […]

“Once, there was a boy who swallowed a bee. His mother told him not to do it. She wrung her hands like threadbare dishrags and keened, but he didn’t listen because sometimes little boys do not listen to their mothers. The bee didn’t sting his throat or his belly, but it didn’t die either. It […]

“Edie had never before in her life seen two human beings having sexual relations. She’d seen R-rated love scenes, yes, but certainly never the real thing in person. She’d never even seen an honest-to-God dirty movie. But there they were, the Russian woman crouched on all fours and Tim, Tim with no lawnmower of his […]

“Chana Finkelstein made a golem baby. She was washing beets in her kitchen sink when she got the idea. The beetroots always had clumps of clay clinging to them, and there was a bright pinprick of surprise at the heft of the first little glob that she held in her hand. It was substantial, dense, […]