Jo wakes up with a lump on her throat. Not in, but on. She sees it first in the bathroom mirror as her face fades into view through the steam from the shower. It’s about the size of a marble, gelatinous in consistency. When she touches it, she feels it move slightly beneath the skin. Lucille comes...
I am Charles Darwin. I eat owlflesh at Cambridge University. I have discovered something, an entirely new species with tropical fever in its reptile fingers. I am busy with taxonomying its most peculiar and three-sided armor, its six-toed fitness for these latitudes and its perfect speckled eggs...
I am told these are among the most dangerous tides in the world. I come from a country with dangerous tides, but only in theory: I am not familiar with that pull. I would not know what to avoid, so I pick my way across, nearest the shore, my soles sucked down, thinking of opaque glass and broken...
It is late April, too early yet for tourists. The cashier looks at me through a pair of smudged glasses that perch precariously at the tip of his nose. His curious eyes study my features, searching for clues: a hint of an Adam’s apple or eyebrows that are just a smidge too thin. He is considering...
just north of the texan blackland is a home with a stale teapot. an abandoned rain boot is the perfect centerpiece for the bottle cap table. and when it rains, it’s where to keep all the petals she’d stuffed in the tissue box. candy wrappers keep us warm. it helps, the crinkling they make...
Reviewed by Anuja Varghese Helen Chau Bradley, Personal Attention Roleplay (Metonymy Press, 2021), 216 pp., $18.95. Helen Chau Bradley’s fiction debut Personal Attention Roleplay opens with the line, “I first fell in love with a girl to the theme song of Top Gun.” The story, titled “Maverick,” is...
