My small kitchen has barely enough room to turn around in, yet I had the feeling I was being watched. When I experience it again, just seconds later, I realize it was eyes watching, actual eyes, not a camera or machine.

But I am quite sure, in my loneliness, there is nothing that aches inside me more, than a desire to persist.

Every time Hector left his home he wondered if it was for the last time. It was Monday at 2:45, so he was standing in the bedroom near the tall mirror, staring into his dark eyes. In the past, she would lovingly help him dress with her tiny, perfect fingers. She…

You're on the Ferris wheel, and the wind is blowing just a little bit, and the sky is invisible behind a wash of white clouds, and your little yellow box tips when you look down, down to the fairway swinging. In the boxes below grandmothers are shrieking …

Her purse still hangs on the knob by the door, and seeing it is all that keeps Josh from freaking out because he knows she can’t go too far or too long without her purse.

Almost to the elevation of regret.

The world—the natural world—was terrible and beautiful in wartime. The leaves shuddered off trees. The pockmarked fields. The fallen brick chimneys. The way the birds heaved together in enormous flocks like rescue missions and then just as…

War The once shining lake was busy draining itself. All the better cared for boats were looking like disjointed discarded single shoes in a messed up paint chipped closet. No one was thinking well okay a leaky sole is better than a wounded heel. You get the…

Her skirt is so short, said the teenage girls to each other. I was 7 years old. I said: she looks like a slut. They laughed; I blushed. Later, the slut smiled at me. I tried to find the teenage girls but they were gone. I wanted to say: it's actually a pair of…

Although radiation and chemo rendered him a wraith...

They try to incorporate a little of Ravel around their edges, the ones where their molecules bump off into other parallel realities, into other non-localities, into other potentials. She isn't buying it. She's tuned in. And she can tell.

Every time she tries to sleep they come; legions of small armored things scuttle claws aloft across the purple sand as soon as she stops moving.

Suds, like gossamer bandages at her wrists, concealed the turbulence below but could not relieve it.

are you like the rest of us and you disagree with war yes i said i disagree with war and he said only one man agrees with war but he won t go to the war

No. No. No.