Crazyshorts! – swamp pink

Vanishing Act

The year I turn eighteen, my father manifests his own brand of magic. My mother, sister, and I all crowd around the kitchen table while my father sits at the head, grinning slyly. He begins the show by laying a pen in front of us and we watch as the writing utensil vanishes, getting paler...

Spinning Stories

What happened was we found a photo. No one knows where it came from, but now it’s on all of our phones and we are being sent to the principal’s office one by one. In the photo Ms. E is wearing bikini bottoms and nothing else. She is standing on a beach with her hands...

Foods of the Bible

September 28, 2017

In Sunday School we learned about the wheat and the chaff. Okay, so everybody has their weird memories. Our teacher lined us up. Wheat on the right, chaff on the left. Some of you are good, some of you are bad. Some will rise to heaven, others will descend to hell. She pretended to carry...

Matt's Comics

September 28, 2017

My brother and I didn’t read the same kind of comic books, growing up. It’s not that I read girl comics and he read boy comics. More complicated than that: Matt’s comics were never American, but were imported from elsewhere in the world (Spain, France, Japan) and possessed plotless violence and peculiar vulgarity—naked long-haired women...

Sick Day

September 28, 2017

When I wake up, the top of my forehead aches ferociously, like a little man is taking a ball-peen hammer to the corners of my skull from the inside. I touch the skin above my temples, both of which are swollen and tender. Sam is already awake. I turn my head towards the window. A...

The Exterminator

September 28, 2017

He doesn’t often confess, but she’s said, Poor thing, and so he tells her. He tells her he used to keep possums for pets, and this, he knows, is a confession because no one likes possums. Because possums are dirty. Because mostly we fear disease and what comes next. He’s explained that likely the possum...

Bozeman, Montana

There were no witnesses when the barn came down. It was 1927. Charles Lindbergh had just completed the world’s longest nonstop transatlantic flight. He wasn’t the first but he was the best. Or something to that effect. We heard so on the weekend radio program. He flew the Spirit of St. Louis, a pretty, check-nosed...

Girl Doll

After the first girl there was another. She wore her hair cropped close to her head because she would eat the strands if they were long, and her Peter Pan collar was grass-stained. I was lying in the shadow of the slide at the park, daydreaming about the three-dimensionality of skeletons, when she sat down...

Sweater

The moms and dads of Eden Prairie gathered at the Kinneys’ house, dressed as cats and superheroes for the most part. Ned was Pig Latin. He wore a pig mask and wrote Carpe Diem on his stomach, which he flashed at everyone throughout the night. His wife Susan was a Ceiling Fan, which is to...

The Buried Man

When Barbara was a little girl, a stranger led her to a house with an odd front door. It was a not a menacing stranger—more likely a family friend who had been improperly introduced. This person had walked ahead up a long, shady, sidewalk, which was cracked and mossy from the roots of old trees...

A Rearing Pact

My son tells me I can walk up silos and I struggle not to laugh at him. My wife and I have made only one rearing pact: never laugh at our son, never let him feel dumb. This was easy before he began talking. His claims began small and I could humor him easily. He...