Eventually the house was going to fall into the sea—just pitch right over and tumble down the bluff. That was why it was cheap. Why they could afford it.
Their realtor said it was nothing to be concerned about. That was years away, he said. It probably wouldn’t happen at all.
Our only child has transformed into a starfish. They called it a compulsion, then a desire. Limb by limb, eye by eye, they replaced the body we gave them. Is this worse than puberty? I can’t ask. Our child speaks starfish now: chemical excretions and spindly touch. I am as ignorant and useless as they swore in their youth I was.
The gourd appeared three days after my miscarriage. Its massive body, swollen and puckered with warty growths, stretched from one end of the butcher’s block to the other. Bulbous and green with a light-yellow underbelly, it sat there in the center of the room unbothered by its own mysterious appearance in the household.
Nothing about the 32-pound gourd made sense.
Some time, before we noticed it, Ah Ma had started renovating our cramped one-bedroom apartment into rows of cardboard boxes, boxes she got from buying canned beans, jars of spicy bamboo shoots, packs of Long Life noodles, because Ah Ma never buys just one thing at a time, that’s cheap and lonely, and we’re neither, instead, she buys things in double at least…
We packed an ice chest and drove from civilization to a grave. We drove forty-five minutes to a sea in the middle of the desert. You said the Salton Sea was a mistake—an engineering failure that caused the Colorado River to flood the Imperial Valley in 1905. But the mistake seemed a blessing in disguise.
I enter the Gaza Strip weekly, my routine the same: cross the border, get settled into my office, and then walk around the corner to purchase fruit and vegetables for the week from Abu Emad‘s market. In my 5 years in Palestine, I have become a regular at this market.
Here in the grotto, we whisper like sinners sipping on wine stolen from a stocked cabinet or an under-staffed supermarket with broken cameras—ours for the taking. Our secrets are coated in fermented, besotted grape juice, brains buzzing and swollen against our skulls, the rest of us just as desperate to be free.
Midday, standing on the gray, vinyl floor of his small kitchen in Chicago’s West Side, Ozzie took a can of sardines from the cabinet and pried open the top. His flannel robe hung loose, exposing gnarled blue veins running down his legs. He stood motionless as he stared into the tin.
Before curfew, Friend Bar is a G.I. hangout. After curfew, it belongs to us, the expats. We think of it as our private after-hours dive tucked away on the second floor of a broken-down building in a seedy part of Seoul.
Four girls in five years, wow, did you plan that? Do they all have the same father? Are you going to try for a boy? Have you figured out where babies come from?
She’ll be dead that evening, but neither of them knows this. In her final moments, as the car flips over, she will not think of him but of her parents, of how she would give anything to spare them the pain they are about to experience.
The neighbor had a few trees removed, and they had to leave the trunks out on the lawn overnight. The sun went down, or the truck was full, or else I guess they maybe just needed a break. They were ash trees, I think. . .
The first time it really hit her, Rosa was in her teens.
The children were spending their summer vacation at the sprawling García ranch at the foot of the sierras, and on a particularly hot afternoon, she had gone bareback riding with Soledad, while the rest of the kids stayed behind playing children’s games. Daring each other, they ran the horses hard and far from the house. . .
Ollie is pulling his eighteen-month-old sister’s hands. “Come on, Mae. I wanna show you. Come with me, Mae. Come with me.” She is pulling away from him. He is too strong. Keeps pulling. Mae begins to wail. . .
Noah reads the headline from today’s Baltimore Sun: “Get Ready For Brood X: The Once-Every-17-Year Cicada Swarm Is Coming.” The last time Noah heard the chirping of Brood X, a petite girl in a blue nightie slowly opened the door, from inside her hotel room. She had small hips and a baby’s face, looking nowhere near the twenty-one years old her ad claimed her to be . . .
After high school, Laura, Camille, Jeanette, and I got twenty-hour-a-week jobs at the Avalon Mall and devised elaborate plots to maintain long-distance relationships with our boyfriends. Gracie announced that she’d bought a ticket to Saigon. . .
We blinked.[…]
We forgot the umbrella just outside the front door. It was a practicality as it dried, but I found it poetic and left it there which was not very practical at all. Except for the spider, who deemed it a buttress for the curved extrados of his home He rests saintly still upon his lattice cathedral, so still that I assume him dead until I accidentally shatter the intricate webbing with my hips. . .
After placing a bottle of consciousness decoherent in my basket, I look up and find myself locking gazes with a shopper at the opposite end of the recreational delirium aisle. Instantly, I am enchanted by her augmented eyes. Which themselves aren’t an uncommon enhancement, but her modified irises are clearly a bespoke customization. . .
One by one, Nina managed to sleep with every man—fat, thin, tall, short, hairy, and bald—at the advertising firm where she worked. It wasn’t something that she planned, and it wasn’t something of which she was either proud or ashamed. Like much of life, including her brief marriage to a man who played the theremin, it just happened. . .
The rules are simple: the Boys chase the Girls, and the Girls are dragged under the slide when captured. I look down to see the growing crowd of Girls beneath the slide, kicking gravel, as the gangs of Boys grasp at arms and ankles and the backs of LimitedToo t-shirts sprinting breathlessly away from them.[…]
If you need to feel new again, go out and feel the rain drop on your skin. If you have things to say but no one to listen, let your mind converse under the shower. If you are about to stress-eat, don’t.[…]
We’re given the dolls when we’re young. We tear off their arms and legs and heads, reattach them with glue and hair ties with a little fire for welding.[…]
When you find a Polaroid of your dying grandmother, should it go back in the hallway drawer with last year’s birthday cards, or into your wallet? Can leather shelter the dead? Safekeep ashes of past-life?[…]
In Wordscapes, you cannot pull a jagged tooth from a lovely mouth. Pretty makes try makes yet. Beautiful makes flit makes fate. Wordscapes has never asked me to spell death, which makes heat makes date makes tea. Without power, heat is unbearable.[…]
Man: Honey, I really want to support you. I know it’s a lot with the kids and school and disinfecting the mail and everything.[…]
I had scattered the scallions too soon for the oily black seeds to germinate. They needed warmth, patience, and timing, but I’d rushed them. They sniffed the chilly air, trusted their instincts, and refused to sprout.[…]
I was blown over by the swift, sharp gale that was your dismissal; it knocked me flat. When I finally got my breath back and gingerly sat up, the monster was directly in front of me, and I saw that it had grown again.[…]
I remember a damp paper towel in my hand, a dusty rose-colored lampshade on my night table, and the sun streaming through the windows of my bedroom. My hand spun in a circular motion, watching as the dust became trapped in the sunlight, even after I heard Francisco had been shot in broad daylight.[…]
Looking down at the little lump of ashes in the crease of the sports page, I wet my finger in my mouth, touched it to the ashes and put it on my tongue.[…]
Six filaments from my clenched fist end up in the wastebasket. The tease and tug are pushing obsession buttons. I react to phantom touches, swipe, and come away with nothing. Repeat.[…]
A literary and art journal
from the MFA community at
Antioch University Los Angeles.
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Andrew Brandveen
Soramimi Hanarejima took this photo and retains the rights to it as its creator.