I’m feeling queasy, but there’s nothing in my stomach to vomit up. Opening my eyes is disorienting, so I close them again. I open my eyes. Okay, this feels better. I’m in a familiar place. There’s sunlight pouring in through my bedroom curtains, the ones with the border of pale green ferns. I’m going to be all right. Shit. No, I’m not. For some reason, I’m sitting on the floor, and that’s me in my bed, and. . . I’m…
Q: What can you tell me about your body? A: Well, to start with, I should probably say that this is one of the best bodies I’ve had. Human bodies, that is. I really loved being a red-tailed hawk, and I think back fondly about all my friends when I was a seahorse. But I’ve had some pretty shitty human bodies, not all of them, mind you, but yeah, for such a long time, everyone was dying from something awful…
I went to Kaitlyn’s party. I knew that sooner or later, Heather would be there. She likes to barge in and take over. I mean, most of the time, we get along great, but then she feels like she wants all the attention, and I feel like I get shoved back into a corner. Not literally a corner, of course, but you know what I mean. Heather was talking about math class, which nobody was interested in. Nobody else is…
I wrestled the new sewing machine out of its box. It had taken me a long time to choose it. Decisions are always like that for me. There were so many attachments! I had skimmed the part of the brochure where it talked about the attachments, because my old machine didn’t have any, so I figured I wouldn’t use them. Each attachment came in its own little square white paper envelope with the name typewritten on it. I started looking…
Everyone was talking about the starships, how they had come to Earth, wondering what they wanted. So, bored out of her mind and stuck in her cubicle in the User Interface Engineering section of her company’s Website Development Department, Linda found a post on reddit that claimed they had a number you could use to text the aliens. She texted them, “Please take me with you!” Anything to get away from this shitty job, this shitty life, she thought. She…
Moms “The Joy Luck Club” is almost over. He asks, “So what was your mom like?” “I just remember her being a beautiful social butterfly. I wish I’d known her better, but I was young when she died.” I can feel my jaw tighten. I don’t want to talk about this. “What about yours?” “It was hard for her, being an unwed teenage mother. My dad occasionally showed up, but it was my stepfather that took care of us. She…
I’m waiting for the waitress to bring me my key lime pie. I check my watch. There’s still time. “Hey, there! I almost missed you. You did something to your hair.” You sit down opposite me. “Oh, yeah,” I say, still looking for the waitress. “You probably forgot. It was just last week, but of course, we haven’t seen each other in –“ “Must be five years now?” you act like it’s a question, but I know you know exactly…
I took another sip of my coffee, trying not to hate my life. “Hey, are you going to finish that?” Charlene indicated a half-eaten croissant on my plate. “No, go for it,” I mumbled, looking around for the waitress to top off my coffee cup. The coffee at this place was okay, but I had forgotten that the baked goods were not. It was nice to be able to sit on the sidewalk and watch the world go by, though. …
Jamie and me, we’re walking barefoot along the beach. Nobody sticks around after Labor Day, so the beach is empty, just two girls with the wind tangling our hair. We walk towards Dead Man’s Rock. I don’t know if anyone else calls it that, but we do. It’s a big boulder that’s only in the water when the tide’s in. When we were kids, like last summer, we used to climb on it and whoever got to the top first…
The old road she walked on every day was lined with overgrown bushes they called beach plums, though they were really wild roses. The sky was huge and overcast, and the air was full of the drone of insects overlaid with the screaming of gulls in the distance. Christina had asked her where she walked, and when she had said, “down to the salt marsh,” Christina had caught Evan’s eye as if to confirm something, and Evan had said, “Be…