“They bring me my lunch at 11:00, which is too goddamn early. They think because we’re old fucks we can’t wait until a decent hour. Then they bring us snacks in the afternoon, like we’re toddlers. I tell that nurse with the cornrows, I understand it’s an easy mistake to make, since we’re all shitting […]

“Remy and I would skip school and watch The Price is Right. He said it improved his English. We’d end up almost naked, but never quite, on the couch in my basement, smoking just enough of my mother’s grass so that she wouldn’t notice what we’d pinched. We were a pile of skinny arms and […]

“The rabbits are watching us always. They hunch on the lawns and brandish slanted black eyes. They’re not much into conversation. Mostly, we receive strongly worded pamphlets in our mailboxes. They address us as comrades, but as far as I can tell that does not inspire a popular sentiment of solidarity. On Thursdays they send poetry, […]

“Third time, he called as a demon bear, arms spilling with apples from the haunted orchard. My daughter stood on the porch, and the demon bear slouched against the rain barrel, looking up at her with achy brown eyes. Her cotton dress was cinched at the waist and her gumboots were muddy. He fed her […]

“Every time she cut our hair, after my brother and I had been carefully brushed clean, she gathered the blond hanks from the kitchen linoleum and rolled them between her palms. She carried these small skeins cradled in her apron, out the back door. She buried them there, in the same place where she dropped […]

“We scaled the chain link fences and swam in the hotel pools in the middle of the night. We had sex on the deserted mini golf course and pretended it was post-apocalypse. Stole beers, swallowed little heaps of tiny white ephedrine, smoked Camel Wides laying on our backs in the sand. All the dumb kid […]

“Tammy taught me to pinch my nipples so they would stand out under my t-shirt, and that purple shadow was best for my green eyes. She taught me that putting on a Pink Floyd record was a surefire way to get a boy to make out with you when your mom was still at work […]

“Grandmother lived in the woods and brought us meat. We three sisters washed and swept, and every night took turns saying to each other If you should die upon this mattress, I will cover your bones with earth. Grandmother taught us that. She wore the pelts of foxes and wolves. Winters she would sleep in […]

“It’s early on a Saturday night in December, already dark, and it’s so cold we can’t feel our faces. Boone and I are crunching ice beneath our boots, walking a pitbull named Dorothy. The dog isn’t mine, or Boone’s either. She belongs to a guy I just met, a guy with porno pin-ups in his […]

“Cecilia Cherry picked her nose. She picked it until it bled, and then she’d scrape at the scabs until it bled some more. Her nostrils were always ringed with a dark red crust. The other children in her third-grade class noticed, of course. They noticed also that she often made the mistake of tucking her […]