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My girlfriend became a hungry ghost on the 4th of August, twig-necked with skin as wet as gasoline, needlepoint mouth unable to keep down anything. We met on a language exchange app, me the English teacher who’d swooped into Hongdae like a sudden wind, her the ulzzang who dreamed of opening a BBQ restaurant […]
It was only her eyes that changed; gently, until one day she saw about her not grace but men: fragile in their frailties, their palms’ spread wingspan just as wide as her own hands. They were born together, youths together, fought arms linked in the grass-shot fields of Troy, grew tall together: wan shadows of […]
(Content note for sexual assault.) We all make mistakes. As I sit on the floor of my bedroom, surrounded by the journals I kept in high school and in my twenties, and fill out the doctor’s form, I tally mistakes in the corner of the paper. Before marriage, before Dover’s and my quiet nights trading words […]
When Niovi tried to smuggle her mother’s ghost into the new country, she found herself being passed from one security officer to another, detailing her mother’s place and date of death over and over again. “Are you carrying a ghost with you, ma’am?” asked the woman in the security vest. Her nametag read Stella. Her […]
My labor pangs are mild at first. They’re intense, sure, but it’s mostly warmth and pressure like my abdomen is hugging itself. I’ve got time. Hours maybe, before I have to flee the enclave and get myself to the birthing hideout. In the meantime, I’m in our makeshift infirmary, trying to get water past old […]
(Content Note for emotional abuse and mentions of sexual abuse.) For Shirley Jackson and Charles Dickens “This is a true-crime tale?” Two reporters sharing the shuttle with us, and of course I got the one who hadn’t done her homework. I suppose I should have been flattered that they were there—a Broadway musical spun off the […]
proper speech requires sharp teeth. the trick is to not make the sharpening process lengthier than it needs to be, especially with your condition. lay out your expectations. do you intend to smile while you speak today? put more time into polishing as you sharpen. do you have a couch date with your soul-bonded lover […]
When I wake, I am curled up as small as a seed. My hands are tucked between my knees, my face pressed into sweet loam. Morning dew blankets my skin like thick, glistening fur. There is a small potato beetle, yellow with black stripes, on my shoulder. I don’t doubt that there are more elsewhere, […]
The Magician Takes a Bow How many people can say they were there the night the trick went wrong and the Magician died on stage? Certainly, that first morning on the strip—dazed gamblers blinking in the rising light, the ambulance come and gone, with the smell of gunpowder lingering in the air—everyone claimed they knew […]
It was a nice enough cabin, if Zanna ignored the dead wasps. Their bodies were in the bedroom, all over the quilt and the floor, so she’d sleep in the living room until they ascertained whether there was a live wasp problem as well as a dead one. If she ignored the wasps, it was […]
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