As a kid I heard the word malignancy as “Malig-Nancy” like an evil woman’s name, no matter how many times Kiwi and the Chief and Dr. Gautman himself corrected me. Our mother had mistaken her...

Wait, that’s your idea? That’s your expert advice? You’re going to tell these novelists to just keep going? You’re going to tell these honest, earnest writers: You gotta have faith? Those are George Michael lyrics,...

The body can be a marvel of resiliency, a cactus when it comes to sleep – capable of surviving on mere drops.

We’ve been working out of our tin can for half a decade. Nobody suggests moving into a brick-and-mortar office; nobody wants to peer through glass windows, in a building with a foundation, and admit that...

There is a loneliness that must be particular to monsters, I think, the feeling that each is the only child of a species. And now that loneliness was over.

There were many deficits in our swamp education, but Grandpa Sawtooth, to his credit, taught us the names of whole townships that had been forgotten underwater. Black pioneers, Creek Indians, moonshiners, women, ‘disappeared’ boy soldiers...

I look for my sister but it’s hopeless. The goggles are all fogged up. Every fish burns lantern-bright, and I can’t tell the living from the dead. It’s all just blurry light, light smeared like...

I’m not going anywhere,” she told me that night. But until we are old ladies–a cypress age, a Sawtooth age–I will continue to link arms with her, in public, in private, in a panic of...

the gravity of wound to fist

There is a rustle of dead leaves. Dried sap, a branch crack, the whirring teeth of Mr. Omaru’s saw. My father–my real father–is a limb that got axed off the family tree a long time...

Mothers burning inside the risen suns of their children.