“Athena Dreams of a Hollow Body”
Boston Review, GLOBAL DYSTOPIAS
After the recall the apartment felt empty. No mother beavering away on her computer. No mother wired into her battery pack at night...
First Place, Flash, 59th New Millennium Awards & The Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology
The children deepen the pits they’re digging, pile gravel in the outfields to make cairns like the ones they’ve seen on Mars....
“All We Remember Will Be Forgotten”
In chisel-hollowed stumps and backyard boxes, the bees had lived and gathered pollen and spun food and refused to reproduce...
For a long time, I lived in my childhood—first as a child, then for many years after. I sat on the patio, spit watermelon seeds in the grass…
When I was a child I loved a little matchbox. It was made of cardboard, long and thin, small enough to disappear in a child’s palm…
“Sockeye”
We moved the cabin from Anchor Point to Homer, thirty miles on winding roads, up Diamond Ridge and down the bluff…
We moved to a city by the Great Lakes from another country. The cherry tree in the front yard bloomed not long after we moved in…
At first there was the feeling, a sliver in her belly. Deep down, lodged in the pelvis, sharp and magical, frozen and swimming, singing to itself in the dark...
“Green Walls Lit in the Night”
Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature
At the point when part of me knew our relationship would be over soon, we were living in a country governed by its military…
Zero. We came to an island with cold shores.
One. Formerly, hedges patchworked the fields and turned the roads to green mazes. With the hedges razed, the nuthatches fled…
“Where We Went and What We Did There”
Winner of the Gulf Coast Prize in Nonfiction, selected by Darin Strauss
We arrive from the south. We come to the end of a peninsula on a glacial bay at the edge of the western shore…
I was born a mother of three children on an island in the north. Every day I put one on my back and two in their stroller and went out to the coffee shop. I felt our bodies move forward; we lifted our faces and breathed cold air as the wheels turned under our weight…
You start a fire with old Budweiser boxes and pallet scraps. We sit on camp chairs and drink cans of weak beer as the tarantulas crawl by on the dirt road, headed south to mate. You walk up the hill behind you every day in the high heat, up to the top and then back down again…
Stone Canoe 10, reprinted in Short Reads
These days I drive the I-390 past trees just splotched with red. For three years I lived in a country without autumn, where nothing ever died, and now even the grasses in the verge turn yellow, tall stalks proud that they’re on their way out…
“Transfer”
The smell of cologne comes on a burst of wind as the sun beats down and the gulls wing overhead…
Clown sightings had gotten out of hand, the school board determined…
I open the cedar chest and shake out the first thing that comes to hand…
Image credits, left to right by row: Michael Coghlan, Саша Федюк, abu, StevertS, imlane, Melissa Warp, Nichapa, molokot, 光二 岡藤, Nurin, atleetali, CB_Stock, Natalia, kiimoshi, Fitri, kichigin19, Elena Schweitzer, Melissa Warp