I have to eat trash again; there’s no other choice tonight. I trudge toward the lonely house by the train station and sag with relief when I see an empty driveway. No car means no judgement, no guilt, no intense conversation. The house belongs to […]
While I lay bricks for a house I could never afford, a day shy of a year after Leigh picked me up from rehab for the last time, I think about falconry. How the bird needs to share a strong bond with its falconer for […]
We dressed like cowboys for the occasion. Furry chaps, jeans and frilly shirts we found in the attic, cowboy hats our grandpa gave us, and just like that, we were practically miniature replicas of John Wayne, and we had our dad to thank for forced […]
(mac)ro(mic) readers will remember One Day in the Life of a Haunted Minimalist House by Laura Eppinger: an excellent, different kind of haunted house story that we ran back in July. This piece and six other flashes appear in Eppinger’s chapbook Loving Monsters, available now […]
The house finch has a red head and breast. There are three on the feeder this morning, little bursts of crimson between a frenzy of brown—chickadees and sparrows, boring birds, or so I thought. Over a few weeks of observation, I have come to notice […]
I took early maternity leave and spent the last month of my pregnancy wrapped in blankets on my bed, alert and blinking. I suppose I missed some signs. When he came, he was an egg that slipped forth without edges, like driving too quickly over […]
Watch. Always watch. The day watch. The night watch. Never turn your gaze. There will be signs. This is how the mouth will curve. How the brow will bend. The eyes will have that look. That look. Listen. Listen to the language of sighs. This is the […]
Between Ava’s Nana saying you’re a growing girl, eat and her mom telling her that should be enough, a fissure line forms across the dining room table. Where before there was surface so flat she never noticed it, the ocean to a fish, her body […]
I think I love her. I really do. I love her speckled face, freckles like crumbs across the bridge of her nose, falling down her cheeks to the corners of her lips. I love the way she sees. The way she looks at things, not […]
Today, I discovered The Moment You Stopped Loving Me. Just sitting there, casually, out in the wild. I was shocked that it didn’t even seek cover when I approached. Later, after some research, I found that The Moment You Stopped Loving Me doesn’t have any […]
Though in her defense K really did fear that Paint. I saw it take shape like that myself more than once, say when she’d step inside the barn to ask me something strange—say strange like: Art, suppose that’s throwable clay making up the red shores […]
During the Spanish Civil War, they ate my grandmother’s cat. If you were to meet her, she would tell you the story and get sad. Now her present is receding and her cat is getting closer, so sometimes she is seven again, alone in the […]
