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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 […]
I am dying of the war, though not in it. Such is the nature of wars. A person doesn’t have to die in battle to be killed by a war. A person doesn’t even have to be a soldier to die of one. Wars have always been slow killers as well as quick. The war […]
I work to put away these daggernails of mine and carve off each stain of the hurt, each line of the black love that turned my burnished skin to furs to sweat in, to wear as uniform’d curse— I won’t lie, I wake up snarling. I want to rend what turned me so, I want […]
(Content Note for use of racist slur.) John Wood boarded the Gracie-Ella ahead of the crew. He carried his sea chest on his shoulder. In a satchel slung low on his hip were his tools and the three things most precious to him: a lock of his grandmother’s hair, a shaving from the first cabinet […]
When I was growing up in Miami, my late mother, Patricia Stephens Due, sat down with me on Saturdays to watch “Creature Features”—old Universal film classics like Dracula, The Mummy, and The Mole People. The first deep scare I remember is the end of the 1958 version of The Fly, when the scientist/fly caught in […]
The funeral is nearly over when the dead captain explodes. Roses turn to shrapnel. The cathedral is lost in fire. I am drenched in blood. Bone buries itself in the wall next to my head, my arm, my howling, open mouth. I am standing at the back of the room where a sin-eater’s child belongs, […]
The wind’s moving fast again. The weathermen lean into it, letting it wear away at them until they turn to rain and cloud. “Look there, Sila.” Mumma points as she grips my shoulder. Her arthritis-crooked hand shakes. Her cuticles are pale red from washwater. Her finger makes an arc against the sky that ends at […]
Expecting, always, the resurrection, I made a study of wounds: the catgut stitch, the keloid itch; broke bones to watch them freshly bridge; read Gray’s and Ebers, lamplit, while my right hand charted tides. I toured the graves, clasped disinterred men close to gaze through their shocked eyes, seeking: a kite’s reflection, a last impression, […]
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