Web Conjunctions is live with my piece "In These Times the Home is a Tired Place"!

1. Only one dream the mother remembered: driving, dead bodies on the road, the word PAPER large and black on a billboard. Sometimes she made up different dreams when she woke panicked in the gray morning, imagining an airport chase, a lake drowning—but they weren’t really hers, only dreams she believed she should have instead of always the one: driving through death and the urge to pull over.

2. The girl spent a Saturday morning cutting snowflakes from a pile of paper she’d found on her mother’s desk. The snowflakes were peppered with sliced negotiations, diamond-pierced words like child and property and alimony, and when the girl finished she strung the flakes together and hung them from her window so they trailed to the berry bush and flapped in the stirred summer wind...

West Branch arrived with my story You Are a Good Girl I Love You"!

A note posted on my fourteen-year-old sister’s door, a warning:Our house has walls and doors like any other house and inside each house are rooms and inside the rooms are beds with covers and no matter how much you kick the sheets mom shrink-wrapped to the mattress the covers are heavy on a chest.

My sister’s explanation for why she now slept on her bare mattress naked.

p.s. if this is a problem i will gladly sleep clothesless in the backyard.

My father pounding on the door yelling Beatrice If I’m Late and Beatrice You Think I’m Impressed You Are A Child...

Gargoyle arrived with my story "Ultimate Makeover: Zombie Edition"!!!

In bed with Romero, and he wants me to do this Ultimate Makeover Zombie Edition. While he explains the deal, I gnaw at his arm – because he likes it, not because I’m the kind of zombie who nonstop gorges on living flesh. There’s nothing uglier than a fatso zombie, like my friend Amelia. I only eat the equivalent of one human a week – just bits and pieces – the lean parts. I could never eat Romero, because he is my Lord.

“Dead is still in,” he says. “But you’re a little too dead.”

The brightness of his apartment gives me a headache. Off with the covers and my body’s blue and purple, some new craters on my belly where the flesh has worn away. I should stop staying here with Romero – it depresses me...

"Grocery Store Decisions" in Nap  (Available online)

Next to me at the DMV, you made sense of blurry letters. You saw lights flash temple-level. You bragged about missed speeding fines, then mentioned that time I left-turned from the wrong lane and got a ticket. Like charm is a part of it...

"Misvision" in Nap  (Available online)

Grocery store decisions are better made together we scour aisles, follow lists on paper scraps marked with vertical checks are half-arrows, lines with elbows, pleased kinks fissure quickly...

"You Can Have Fun in September" is live in Bluestem

For a college-dropout, the most depressing part of the school year was the beginning. All those cars and trucks on campus, parents loaded down with furniture, clumps of nervous students wandering the streets, and the banners everywhere: “Welcome to Tar Heel Country!” It was all so hopeful and exciting. Energy remained energy, even if it was the kind you didn’t want, pulling locals like a magnet, like a spectacle; and I was never good at carnivals. All that color and festivity, the crowds and whirling rides that sent me running for the bushes, where I vomited, watching, in tears...

The Journal  arrived! With my story "What Became of What She Had Made" (Excerpt available online)

Lynette hadn’t heard from Christine in six months and three days. There’d been something of an argument, nothing abnormal. Her daughter was unpleasant on the phone, and Lynette questioned her about her life and whether she ever planned to take it seriously. She figured stubbornness had kept her daughter from calling her back; or else the phone buzzed in a purse on a hook in the morgue, and Lynette really was a horrible mother. It would be her fault somehow...

Excerpt also read on Writers Talk!

"Raucous Exhaustion" is live in BLIP Magazine!

In a van with two bench seats, the boys slept. Taped blankets over windows blocked fussed up brush and green road announcements, and when the parents pointed roadside they pointed out only to each other. A lump of squirrel. A farmhouse painted pink. An elephant cloud split open just ahead, just above, immersion. Cross into Virginia and the up and down of green mountains, fruit pies and cow pies, stretches of puffed trees ready for picking. To the father, Virginia meant driving through a blast-radius of history. The mother kept her excitement at a low-boil...

"If We Miss the Beginning" is live in Pank!

If it doesn’t stop snowing will we miss the beginning? If we miss the beginning and if the beginning is what matters should we encourage the snow and say sorry it was the snow? If the groom gave better directions would we be there already and would the boy stop crying and would we not have to miss the beginning?...

The Cincinnati Review Arrived! With my story "Like Falling Down and Laughing"

The students in my first class at Stewart Wade High gathered on metal bleachers. Ostensibly in adult clothes, they huddled over leather bags and waxy-bright books; they were skinny, but tall. Stretched little kids. The gym smelled of rubber. In Michigan I had taught Advanced Junior Lit, but here in Chapel Hill, Brant and I were forced to take what jobs were available. I explained that the kids were responsible for locking up their clothes...