A Searcher’s Guide to Finding Lost Boys

We lost the boy. We’d lost the boy. Dan Guerri’s boy to be exact, but if you lived in our town–where the clocktower rang twice a day, and the Apple Blossom queen had lost her hand when the Quimby kid turned over his truck after homecoming, and the moon often waited quietly above the wildcats, long into the following day…

Ten Ways to Kill a Goldfish

A sure-fire way to assassinate a goldfish without suspicion is to hand it to a child.

A Small Violence of Breath

The pieces of us ripple in the air, souls split like the seeds of a dandelion clock bursting in the breeze. The doorbell doesn’t ring because I took the batteries out of it before it ever had chance to chime.

Peregrinations

We thought we were making a film about human silence. A shot, from memory: you with a cup of Moroccan mint tea, taking a look at the sunset through the window over the sink where we did our dishes. We thought we were trying to get at things that could not be seen. But who knows.

remember

we arrange soft white bao on a small plate and we bow before it, three times. my sister exclaims when we discover a bite missing, Grandmother has eaten our offering, and we laugh, sing songs arranged around the chilled newly-cleaned gravestone as if we too are bao, asking for Grandmother to consume our love as well.

From Fifty-One to Eleven

When you were five the sky looked so enormous it was invisible. Then your big-kid eyes grew in at nine and you saw its shortcomings in a documentary about the Apollo Missions. From space, it’s nothing really, just a webby membrane coating the world in a thin, blue hum. Back then you didn’t think about how it’s all that separates us from never-ending darkness.

Places We Don’t Go

I’m going on vacation with a lover for the first time. L’s my lover here. He’s driving, I’m sitting in the passenger seat, and we’re a few hours away from Montreal. I believe there’s magic in the province of Quebec, in everyone else speaking French, in the two of us not understanding a thing together.

When You Get Lost, I’ll Be Your Map

On New Year’s Eve I am the villain in mom’s story. I wouldn’t mind the villain part in anybody else’s story, but this hurts big time, like a huge rock has landed on my chest.

Performances

My brother knew the train was coming because it made the ground vibrate in a certain way. We lived close enough to the tracks to feel it, a longer thrum than any other stream of boxcars. He said it was because of the special cargo, elephants and tigers, acrobats and clowns.

We Have to Go Higher

Sydney: gone. Johannesburg, Miami. Obviously Venice and Amsterdam. Shanghai and Lagos and New York. Los Angeles. All within days of one another, some within hours. The satellite imagery plays over and over, the ice sheet tearing free, the waves visible from space.

Contact

My grandfather is momentarily stuck in the middle of his living room, the carpet thick beneath his slippered feet. He has become an awkward statue, a little hunched and leaning forward in a walking pose, like he is waiting for a camera’s click to catch the pretense of an action shot.

Endless

The only places that comforted me were the thrifts. Seconds, second hand, second thoughts. The store hours were hand-posted and usually wrong. Doors problematic, too sticky or didn’t close properly. You had to push hard or pull soft.

Three Lost Songs from an Enslaved Bitterroot Crossing

They climb forever upward, leaving the rivers behind—the Lochsa, Selway, Clearwater. Each step higher into these Idaho mountains makes Sacagawea’s heart thrum the coming home song.

A Defiance of Juxtapositions

Uncle Kev often licked the tip of his index finger and stuck it up in the air when searching for a particular word or phrase. So, after I tell him, “Fuck college, I’m going to make music,” that’s when the damp digit went up and he said…

How Your Life Becomes a Reluctant Endorsement for Little Trees Air Fresheners

You’ll pilfer the contents of your dead mom’s glove box like picking the pocket of a well-maintained corpse.

Todd

Leaning his body against his desk, he was at me, again—asking me why did my elbows look so ashy, if I could read the words in our textbook, if I knew who my father was, if I could talk Black and those brackets, the colorful bands…

Righteous

From what we could tell from the back of the crowd, there was nothing to it but chance, and the odds were bad. Really bad. Two, was it? Out of all of us?

Window Water Baby Moving: A Film by Stan Brakhage

Only months before my father will forget my name, he tells me a story about his time in the Marines, just after high school, before he met my mother. One I’ve never heard before, from when he was stationed in California.

November 17, 1994. 10:17 a.m. Kerlerec Street

Dear Future Maurice, Are you listening? Can you hear me? Do you care? I suppose you might think it’s a strange time to reach out to you as I stand here at a podium in the auditorium of our high school surrounded by two janitors, five administrators, 17 teachers, 513 classmates, and 1.50 x 1029 molecules of unpurified air…

Last Things

Tilney’s village is a cone of houses, a single spiraling street numbered up to 137, his own being number 39 close to the base of the hill. This year Tilney begins to forget much of what he once knew.

Of Age (Caprice)

Comes an hour when even the cat can’t be disturbed from its mammalian nest of sleep, the night-blue of moon and streetlights through the windows the only hue painting these rooms, these unadorned walls and filthy, mop-foreign floors. A baby needs a mobile to ogle at.

Re: Love Along the Mekong

I wrote a story about our travels in Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand in 1995. I’m sorry we lost touch. Years after we parted, I still loved you. Since it was pointless to long for the past, I resolved not to; hence, my silence these past 22 years.

Dream Recorder™

As soon as I open my eyes the Recorder starts to talk, which I think is a design flaw. There is a ten percent chance that you want to beat up your boss, the Dream Recorder™ says, but I wouldn't worry about it.

Black Holes Primp and Mourn the Stars

Some black holes love chewing. Love that full-body crunch. How it starts in the molars and lights down to your toes. Other black holes love swallowing. Love not feeling a thing as it goes down. Love plausible deniability and a throat unscratched.

Height Determined by Distance

We’re in the car again. Dad drunk and playing with the radio from the passenger’s side, his knuckles bruised and swelling. He takes his anger out on the walls, often striking a stud, the drywall crumbling, the picture frames dancing, but hanging on.

11:11

She hasn’t received a birthday card since her hair had color. For more years than she cares to count, she’s spent the mornings of her birthdays in the greetings cards section of her local supermarket. This morning, she picks out one that says, ‘Don’t Grow Up, It’s A Trap!’ She opens it and gets lost in the blankness inside.

Pagpag

The bird had been ten years old. It was a common parakeet, but the store sold it as a lovebird in a pair when Mom bought it for Nina’s 12th birthday. They said that if one of them died, then the other would soon follow after. A week later, one of the birds died.

Pool Toy Guy

Victor inspected the waters’ edge every evening, around sunset. The complex had three pools—the ovoid kiddie shallows, the central exhibition area, and a serious rectangle at the end, subdivided into salami slices to provide swimmers with some direction. Victor checked them all.

Box of Ghosts

You’re sixteen when the woman thrusts the box into your hands on the street, so forcefully that you catch it hard against your chest. It’s shoe-box sized and wooden, with a fancy metal latch.

Three Funerals

Justin would have had nothing good to say about it. On her way to the reception, Margaret mentally replayed the funeral, from beginning to end, stingingly, Justin-style: the director with his slicked-back hair (too Boris Karloff), the minister’s walk-through-the-valley-of-the-shadow-of-death sermon (too pat), the time of year (a gross cliché).

Downhill

Recognizing the familiar exhaustion of sweaty tourists climbing back toward the parking lot, Frank, Jack, and Harriet ran down the steepest section of Sleeping Bear Dunes, allowing their momentum to carry them—breakneck, out of control—toward the endless blue of Lake Michigan.

My Friend Sela

My Friend Sela, The Writer, drinks her drink, pulls at one of her thin gold chains, each with a different charm: wishbone, gold S, gold pineapple. She picks up her phone, checks the screen, sets it down, says, “I read your story. It’s so good, girlie. I was totally in it.”

Dispatches from Afar

Dispatch from Atarantes: there is indeed desert here, but of the people there is no sign. It is said that they are people who live with no names, who eat no meat, who have no dreams. Here in the endless sand, we could see why.

Dear Mike

She tells him that her head has fallen off. She tells him that the nurses squeeze her arms too tightly and the blood-pressure sleeve makes her cry. He says, "I'm sorry, Izzy, that doesn't make any sense to me."

Some Scars Never Go Away

What a noisy and confused phone conversation we had yesterday! Blame my cell phone for garbling your words. The service in my area is unreliable, unlike yours in America.

Confessions

Father, I'm afraid of: Long nights like this. I’m afraid of pain, but not death. I’m afraid of sadness and the sense of abandonment. I'm afraid of dogs, because they don't understand me, and I don’t understand them.

Found

A slip of paper telling me I will surely die. I find one, then many, everywhere: on church benches, bus stop platforms, at the supermarket customer service window. They are written in a hand I don’t recognize.

One Day You’ll Need This

I have taken you to Taiwan many times and hope we can go again before too long. But there will come a day when you decide to return on your own, when you aren’t just tagging along but are propelled by some inner motivation or curiosity to learn about your heritage and your ancestors.

Esteemed Patrons and Fine Folks

Dear Esteemed Patrons: Please do not flush feminine products in the toilets. There are trash receptacles for this purpose. —The Fine Folks at Florentine Trattoria

Do Werewolves Live in the Pacific Northwest?

r/UnresolvedMysteries: My dad and I moved to Riverbend, a small town thirty minutes east of Seattle, Washington, five months ago. I supposedly lived here when I was a baby, but I don’t recall anything about here. Redding and Riverbend are similar, but Riverbend is colder. A lot colder.

Letter to Bucharest Concerning the Use of Blue in Paintings and Music

Dear Bucharest, I keep dreaming the stench of summer light crawling over the outdoor market, the warmed botany of rotting flowers and bouquets of diesel fumes like an extended belch from your hidden stomach.

Rain King

I woke to the sounds of rain on the shake roof, and a mingling of songs from August and Everything After repeating in my mind. It was beyond me why that album, and why now, but you know your crazy brother. Anyway, it made me think of you:

The Sunset Witch

A witch comes at sunset to take children away, my mother tells me. She stopped reading to me before I could remember, but this one she tells without needing a book.

The Hare Moon

“The women in our family never die.” Your grandmother tells you this. The moon is still up when she wakes you and by it, you see her hold one crooked finger to her lips.

Ghost Phone

42.348495, -83.060303; 1974: ...bellwethers or canaries, I don’t know which. It’s what they call a blue note in jazz, intentionally off-pitch. A signal searching for a receiver. Damn, can’t getta tone...

The Widower’s Wife Takes Him to This Year’s Death Gala

“Should I go as drowned?” she says, stroking her blue skin. “Or strangled?” A necklace of bruises purples her throat. “Shot?” she says, as bullet wounds blossom on her limbs. “Or,” and her forehead sprouts a crown of broken glass, “Car crash?”

This Wave, a Little One (Quietly)

There’s a lake that is a locket, a love machine without the machine. Hey that’s me right? you said, pointing to the lapping waves, remembering something I’d said, laughing (sort of).

Among the Stars

My granddaughter, Ray, is obsessed with constellations. She can find them all, even the obscure, complicated ones like Berenice's hair and the keel of the Argonauts’ ship.

Love Songs for Ghosts

The torch singer at the end of the world has found a working cassette player. It is nestled amongst other dust-covered treasures in a Chinatown rummage shop.

Mothers-in-Law

The Divorcee zone of the marriage market was always the sparsest, but Li went everyday all the same. Tucked under her arm were a tape roll and extra copies of the notice for her son…

Storytime?

There are so many details in this print that one could get lost staring at it. And I have. But I want to help you avoid getting taken in and distracted by the picture’s surface level dramas. Allow me to point out where the real drama exists.

This is Our City

I materialize in bed. I glimmer and stand out. My blinkers are on and my heart is warm. He is my phantom limb. I become his tiny little curled up set of legs when we mate.

May You / Live In / Interesting Times

Will sits and sketches a robot onto loose-leaf on his bottom bunk before dinner. Dinner is PB&J if there’s still some left from lunch. PB & syrup if not. Half a sleeve of saltines with that, and maybe a cup of watered-down cherry Flavor Aid.

The Days Last Longer the Further Away You Are

On Mars, there is no one left, but we still think they can hear us. The delay lets us live in moments where everything is alright. It’s only when we get no response and get no response and continue to get no response that we begin to understand.

Bonus Scene from Year of the Buffalo

Scott walked into his boss’s office. Stood for a beat, waiting for Ed to ask what he needed while Ed stared at his computer, waiting for Scott to start.

“I think I need a new chair,” Scott said.

I Have to Leave So That I Can Return

I am always leaving, and I want them to be prepared. Before summer suddenly turns into Fall, before all the leaves have hit the ground, I make sure I have somewhere else to go. I have to leave so that I can return, so that I can make it through the bitter cold months of winter.

Farm Reports

My grandparents have a family farm outside of Wichita. I help shuck corn and find worms wriggling in the freshly-picked ears when I pull their silk blanket off. There are warm snakes under freshly-laid eggs, curing around their oval prizes.

Soon You’ll Be Just Like Us

Wednesday, November nineteenth, the morning I’m scheduled to see my new face. Alice comes to my room, and for the first time, leaves the door unlocked—in fact, wide open.

Two Knocks

Teddy stayed home from school that day, even though her mother had to go to the office. Teddy didn’t feel like going to school, and she said, again and again, I’m sick. I don’t feel well. This was something Teddy had discovered, that repetition could sway parents. This was the new power she had.

Internet Review from a Vampire

Vescelaus slammed the book shut. He’d never been so disgusted in all his life—which was saying something. Vescelaus was immortal.

The Parlor

There’s a police car parked in the street outside Belinda’s house. Belinda can see it from the sagging living room couch where she has just finished her after-school snack–peanut butter and raspberry jam on toast, again.

Vocabulary Lesson

It’s too late to back out now. Already her son sits at the kitchen counter, legs swinging from the barstool, waiting for her. His index cards, all the words his teacher has assigned for this week’s vocabulary quiz, sprawl in front of him like a dissected dictionary.

Saturn Devouring His Son, McCulloch County, Texas, 1982

He watched his father for direction, advice. He tried to bring the rifle up to his shoulder as slowly, as his father did. He struggled but did not want to disappoint.

Nur Jahan Bent over Backwards in Time

When a fourteen-year-old girl, in a haphazard way, writes the names of nineteen wives of Jehangir, a Mughal emperor of India in the sixteenth century, on the mud floor of her cottage with a wooden stick.

Excerpt from Taoism

“Let reality be reality.”* 

In period 3 World Religions Father Riley orders you to stand. He asks if you’ve misplaced your hairbrush. He says you look like a horse. Everyone laughs.

Arrivals

She lands at the airport, the wheels juddering beneath the plane’s frame, her hands pressed to the seat back in front.

Back Here in My Dream, Over and Over Again

Memory tells me where to go, even though my mind tells me it’s my first time here. The familiar concrete steps, the choppy sidewalk, the clear ocean teeming with octopus.

Cherry Creek Reservoir

As if the virus weren’t enough, the middle-aged couple was informed upon arriving at the Cherry Creek Reservoir during their trip to Denver that blue-green algae was present, and swimming would not be allowed.

Assassination

Here’s a fun fact. The Chinese believe the eyeballs of fish to be delicacies, and to be offered one when there are only two! in the whole fish! is considered a great honor.

Excerpt from Cheat

Julio and his mother had spent much of his childhood watching shows that, in hindsight, he probably shouldn’t have been watching. Blind Date and Jerry Springer. Cops. Cheaters.

Nature Sightings Outside My Window

These sightings always start the same. / A little bird chases a big bird / Away from her nest, from her children, / From her husband while he sleeps? / Do birds have husbands? Maybe.

Turtle

Our task is to find food in our nature. My older brother and I are assigned to the same tent—because of my secret. I collect berries, but my brother wants meat.

Excerpt from The Governor

It’s a Monday afternoon, and one of my lovers is telling me that he doesn’t find me as sexy as he used to.

You Always Ask Me How I Write

“Do you write at home?” you ask. “Or outside?”

“Alone,” I answer. “I can’t write with people around me. Especially people I know. It feels like they can hear my thoughts.”

Excerpt from Water as Villain Origin Story

Would you believe they blamed the river? For its honesty, the way it forages for anything’s likeness. Snips each season’s foliage from the trees, suspends the leaves in its wet resin.

The Dog Walker

clips a schnauzer to each leash: the hard puller on the right, the fighter on the left. They start their walk slowly, but the fighter, the smaller one, immediately lunges at his own reflection in the window at Duane Reade.

Excerpt from How High We Go in the Dark

It’s strange how a graveyard the size of a planet could instill hope in us all, help us to understand that our ship was more than a ship and whatever we found would be home not only because of oxygen and water and soil chemistry, but because of us.

Resume (Draft)

Objective: To secure a challenging and rewarding position in management of sinners’ souls.

Moon And Mantle

Silt slit—so along the crevice, detritus and echoed lullabies entered and emerged upon river mouths as such tongues lingered among melodic motions up against eroded banks of stalagmitic earth.

Within Easy Reach of the Rocky Mountains

She can’t help but think of you—imagining the tone of your voice, the shape of your mouth when you say her name.