I fetch her the toy bricks Father made from a fallen hornbeam, but she rolls her eyes, hands me a slice of castellated krustenbrot, sends me to town for a bushel of ginger. She bakes model cottages with strudel-work windows, byres with almond-paste oxen, kennels with marzipan puppies. When her schloss cake collapses from its surfeit of turrets, she simply laughs and starts again. Soon she’s building sturdy barns with dumpling mortar, merchants’ houses with pumpernickel shing

Up the worms came, rotini-thick, chubby palindromes of flesh. “Sorry,” I said. “That’s OK,” said the dirt-specked brain at the bottom of the can. “You could use a win.” "I could blame my misery on the family business but truthfully I wanted it." I would’ve licked glass for a tin can, an old boot—the smallest tug of resistance would cure my everything. Instead: limp nothing. It wasn’t the ocean’s fault—on the other side of the dock, my sister Maude reeled in cascades of wr

Reprint. Originally published in Choatic Merge's last issue The guy in the pizza shop is a conspiracy theorist who thinks giving women too many rights makes them violent offenders who’ll knock a man to the floor over a thin-crust pepperoni. Most days, you linger outside and wait for him to get sidetracked by a call, so his kid takes over the counter – he’s a quiet lad, who just sort of mumbles and passes your order along to his dad after he’s hung up. No fuss, then. You can p

I. A woman sharpens a knife along the bottom of a mug, then pares away the hard brown root beneath an onion. She thinks of when her son first began to toddle and discovered the kitchen. He opened cabinets, banged pots and pans, and played in the basket of alliums. The woman sighs regretfully. Her son had gripped an onion with dimpled hands and handed it to her, then tried to stack one on top of another. He made a mess, scattering shards of onion skin over the kitchen floor.

He was good at tracing things believed lost. Once he found a child. Scarfing hamburgers with workmates perving on lunchbreak girls among the flow of shoppers outside a crowded mall, their sarcastic scores out of ten for sexiness were interrupted when a frantic mother blundered by. Slipping from their land rover he asked quick pertinent questions then directed his trailing mates to search in different directions. After footing it fluidly through the pack inside he triumpha

On Going to the Record Store Manned by an indifferent celestial being named Jesse or Manny in flare jeans and a chambray. All gates to...