imagine the faded polaroid: january 2000, a beach. rippled sand waves, still water. picture me: twenty years old (terrified) and eight months pregnant. my cousin works for united airlines, so we fly standby to san diego for a last hurrah! before i (officially) become a […]
The first time my sister talked about running away was when our stepmother gave us dolls’ clothes she’d sewn from scraps of our mother’s bath robe. When my sister had ripped them at their tiny seams and cried, Jane had called her ungrateful and said […]
“So far as we know, all the fundamental laws of physics, such as Newton’s equations, are reversible. Then where does irreversibility come from?…Why is it that the situations we find ourselves in every day are always out of equilibrium?” — Richard Feynman, Feynman Lectures on […]
Sami’s mom has Sami’s bed facing away from the door because that’s how the devil enters your body when you are asleep and the devil would like nothing better than to possess a girl like you from your toes right on up to your head. […]
At some point in the conversation, Jena could no longer understand what her boss was saying. Sorry. Her former boss. Once she heard the word “downsizing,” her ears clogged up, as if there were chunks of bread stuffed inside the canals. Everything muffled and unbelievable […]
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 […]
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