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Shangri-La

August 29, 2023
The accountant first heard of Shangri-La Magic Massage from her colleague, who gave her a flyer. My parents were from Shangri-La, the accountant had said. Her colleague, who had grown up here in Pittsburgh, laughed. There’s no such place. Shangri-La is an imaginary, beautiful paradise. The accountant, perplexed, wondered if she had misremembered her parents’...

Letter

August 29, 2023
I got a letter from a friend asking for reconciliation. We’d been friends a long time but things had gone downhill recently and I’d lost my temper one night and attacked him under an apple tree. It seemed to me he complained too much, grovelled a lot. He called me up most weeks to get...

An Unexpected Guest

August 29, 2023
At 8:30, Chris pushed through his apartment door, blocked halfway by cardboard boxes, and went straight for the bathroom. The boxes were crammed with books. He wasn’t planning on moving anywhere, at least not in the immediate future, but he wanted to carve out a silent space in his bedroom to keep his brain waves...

TRIPTYCH

March 27, 2023
I. When the message came, I was reluctant to meet with my old friend Lysa. To be honest, I was terrified it would unlock something in me—I, who after several years of sustained hardship had emerged out of the wilderness of my twenties into something approaching stability, or as close to it as was possible...

Heart Monitor

March 27, 2023
His father burned their trash every Sunday after church in their backyard in an old metal oil bin. Said it was obscene for other people to see what they threw away. When he turned twelve, his father opened the bed of matches and told Elias to start it up. Elias could not manage. It might...

Please Be Well

February 27, 2023
We lived in a backyard shed that had been converted into a studio. Legally, it was uninhabitable. The walls were particleboard, the ceiling low enough to touch. Rainwater had warped the floorboards and marbled them with rot. Still, the rent was impossibly cheap, and there’d been no need for credit checks or cosigners. Our lease...

Mercy

February 27, 2023
The band director was tired. He did not understand why the students couldn’t play the piece correctly. The composer had written “with grave reverence” at the top of the score: fifty-five beats per minute. It was the tempo that tripped them up, a slow, limping adagio. These kids. They did not know how to be...

Sunscald

February 6, 2023
I was raised primarily in solitude in a house upon a mountain, on Camino Sin Nombre, that winding road without a name. From below, jutting out from rock, against the dark of the sky and amid the milky thrum of clouds, our house, resplendent with costly light, glowed like a beacon. My father liked to...

Marquise

February 6, 2023
My boyfriend, Charlie, is a photographer. The real kind, not the broke kind. His studio is on the first floor of our duplex in Manhattan. It’s so big that he gets embarrassed when I bring friends over. “Wow, I didn’t know you’re rich,” they say, even though I always warn them in advance that I...

Damage Control

January 12, 2023
In the months between eleventh and twelfth grade, at the behest of absolutely no one, Leonard Lawrence lost weight. A lot of it. Sixty-nine pounds to be exact, enough to just about make up one ten year old boy or maybe two four year old ones. If you stuck to averages. Which Leonard did. Leonard...

The Yellow Phase

January 12, 2023
I. Mrs. Yew was a widow who lived next door to us in the summer of ‘96, then she moved away or maybe fled—it depends on who you ask. When I knew her, I was an excruciatingly shy, small kid who survived mostly by being unseen. My father wanted me to be tougher, and my...

Landlocked

October 3, 2022
The first sale I made was the amber shirt. I photographed it from every angle in my empty living room, laid out on the hardwood, with the weak sunlight coming through the windows. Then I chose the best pictures and uploaded them to my Dresser. Vintage!!! I wrote in the caption. Bought on France Honeymoon...