Senior year, my best friend Tony and I worked the sausage counter in Hell. Third Circle. Yeah, I know, but they pay better than Wendy’s, and once you’re working in fast food, Hell isn’t that much worse.Sure, you didn’t want to think about what the sausages were made of, you came home smelling of the […]
The monster is back, but if it knows I know, it will do worse than eat me. Claws close around my throat as I pay for my soda and Tylenol at the shitty, sticky convenience store down the street.“Keep the change,” I stutter.The clerk cocks his head to the side as I blink back tears, […]
You lead the boy to the copse of tainted fairwoods. It reeks of innocence spilled and soaked into the soil.The boy is just nearing the eve of his adolescence, brown skin smooth and unblemished save for the scrapes and bruises of rough play with peers. Your own brown skin has been corrugated by the decades […]
I.There are countless jets flying over the apartment. They announce themselves with roars so loud they vibrate in my shins. Sasha and I close the blinds and shut off the lights. We huddle on the floor in my room, and I’m sure that we’re about to be blown away any second.Sasha laughs. I don’t think […]
“Use English,” says my mother, Nkij. “Like your father used to. The traders hear one word of what they call ‘Indian talk’, they’ll cheat us extra bad.”I arrive after a half day’s paddle, following the route my father described to me in his dying days. The settlers call this the Public Square. A dust and […]
I came down to the disaster zone in a bubble-skiff, launched from a Responder-class galaxyship in high orbit. It skips and bumps on the turbulence. There are six of us, each wearing the flat white uniforms of United Galactic’s Crisis Response division.Outside the tempered window, the Nerian settlement Galapos burns. My synaesthograph’s goggles telegraph emotions […]
I might get a kitten. Maybe two. Wait, let me back up…It’s 100 degrees, and if I can just keep my garden alive and put this issue together, I’ll call the day a success. These days are so hard for me as a gardener. It’s right up there with the days I have to decide […]