Mama hung them everywhere. It started with just a few, in our apartment and outside on the brick. She made walls into windows.

When I squint at her from across the table I can see the waveforms created by her carrier signal.

Out the window is an empty birdbath, dry flaky concrete ring, no birds.

Everyone runs to the plane but me. I get the last seat (middle of 5), crush men’s bags on my way. I’m white & female. They glare.

She was a beautiful woman. I don't argue with that. I welcome it.

I rummage around to see which of our many countertop appliances might do the trick. Yogurt maker? No, I need something with more muscle. The Cuisinart--just the thing! I pick through the detachable blades—where’s the isotope shredder?

Often we sit in silence and age. We are observers of dust, fashioning ourselves into antiques.

“They picked me up in their spaceship about noon,” Austin Grantham says to me while pulling up an apple crate to use as a stool.

I talk wands and magic and how women aren't supposed to care, but I do, and she talks length and girth. Her fiancé has neither, she makes an illustration with her pinky and says that if they don't marry within the year, she's dumping his ass and we

On the table the image is by Chardin but the puzzle is by someone else and that is what he has dumped out of the box.

the boredom inherent in living in the suburbs

True love may last forever, but the most I've ever gotten out of a lab assistant is two years, five months, three weeks, twelve days, and fifteen hours. And he was the exception.

Did we get Jihadi John?/ And the highway to Mosul?// What’s the score?

I screwed my courage to the sticking point and asked him if he had shot down any Japanese airplanes. He grinned at me. “One,” he said.

He wasn’t there for the beginning or the end. In the beginning, he was still a wild thing. Nothing more than a voice in the chorus of the Dark Continent, back when it was a thing of terrible beauty and attracted people like the old man; people who breathe