You are four when you decide to swim to the barnacle-covered rock where your brother likes to squat, peeling snails up in between waves. You wade and wade until your toes can’t find sand anymore. Until your eyes can’t find sun. Pink floaties slip from your too-thin arms, and you sink for the first time. […]
A curl of bark, stained meticulously with sapWe listened and watched, root and leaf and stem and bark, and learned the marks and the sounds. We are neighbors. The witch says you are too new to be trusted, but we like the way your sprouts laugh and run, like large squirrels. Welcome. We hope we […]
1. Be careful. I have to say that. Otherwise the words will worm in my mind forever, insisting you’re hurt somewhere I can’t find, all because I did not remind you, once more, to be careful. In the aftermath, I noticed the glass bottle first as it rolled down through the wreckage of my house, […]
Bakunawa could eat the moon, but it could not eat Mohammed bin Salman. Every night Manuela silently cried out to it from the fourth story apartment balcony of her employer’s home in Jakarta. But the great sea serpent did not listen. It could not hear her in Jakarta. It could not hear her son in […]
“Did you know mayflies live only a day?” Helena asks.When I don’t reply, she continues, “And the Atlas moth emerges from its cocoon without a mouth—can’t feed or drink until its death. It’s funny, if you think about it.”We’re naked in a bed of moss-soft velvet, our hair twined together like tendrils of wisteria across […]
I was part of the sea, once. I was foam and coral and silvery fish scale, bundled into a tail and a torso with a voice like golden rain. My sisters sang sailors to their deaths and laughed while I collected curious pieces of flotsam. One day, I collected a still-breathing prince draped across a […]
The white lady of Irrigan is so named because one of her experiments bleached a lock of her hair. Her maids, affectionately, claim she is more badger than woman. It makes her smile, but they won’t say a word about the scar that runs down her chest.Irrigan now keeps the windows in her lab open […]
There is a little alleyway that hooks off İstiklal Caddesi known only to the children of Karaköy. On summer nights they spill through the dim doorway at arcade’s end, under the sign that spells “Dr Daidalo and Son”. The little theatre is cramped, its wooden benches bare. They squabble and cuss in their seats, elbowing […]
i. Ours is a small planet, about the size of our god’s fist. Everything is water and sand. If it weren’t for my lighthouse illuminating the oily sea, the entire world would be a dark, solid mass. If I screamed, my voice would sound like a whisper, and if I whispered, my voice would sound […]
The women in my family have death on their lips. No husband lives past a tenth wedding anniversary. My mother says it’s an old curse. Our love makes men drink, choke, slip, fall, suffocate with our hearts growing too big in their lungs to breathe. I thought I would end some man one day too […]