Fiction – Page 5 – swamp pink

The Prince

December 3, 2020

When Frank gets to work he’s told to run the vacuum. Everything in the Prince is carpeted—the foyer, the mailroom, the downstairs lobby, all the hallways on all fifteen floors. The management company replaces the carpet every now and then, but never changes the color from what it is now: chimney-smoke gray. The short-term boarders...

They're More Afraid of You

December 3, 2020

South-Central Los Angeles 1999 I never met my father. I don’t know how my mother died. Sometimes she’d leave the house and come back a couple days later. Until one time, she doesn’t. I am ten. My aunt picks me up from school early, and in the parking lot she tells me my mother passed...

Bronze

December 3, 2020

Jules Harriet’s ear drum ruptured again, this time around midnight in her dorm room. The kit from her stepmother contained balsam-scented face wipes, a silk headwrap she’d never unfolded, and a bottle of jojoba oil she was supposed to rub into her scalp. There was also an unopened pink shell of birth control pills. Page...

Boys Beware

They told him Father was sick. He was up in Sacramento, they said, at a hospital by the lake. Just like Camp Christopher, they said. He would get better, and then he would come back home. Father had driven himself to the hospital that morning, after Jimmy had gone to school. Grandfather had come from...

Mrs. Satosi

If the women Mrs. Satosi usually invited over could see the mid-afternoon sun filtering through the skylights, as it was now, they would have said, “Kai, this kitchen na helele, o.” Tall, smooth mahogany cabinets reached to the crown molding. The warm-hued backsplash of natural stone had been her decision, and it was this aesthetic...

Your Bullet and You

“Oh god,” the man said. “I’m so sorry.” And then he shot her. The woman, who didn’t know the man and couldn’t possibly imagine what reason he’d have for shooting her, was indignant. She didn’t think of herself as the kind of person who would ever be shot. It was like she’d suddenly been told...

Conspirators

December 10, 2019

Halfway through the drive from his place in Maine to his ex-wife’s house near Boston, Nate remembers the mirror. Eight feet tall, a gilt-rimmed rectangle leaning against the wall of the consignment shop, it had caught the three of them, Nate and Kirsten and six-month-old Violet, as they rushed by. They’d just moved from their...

Good Girl

December 10, 2019

Because her parents are getting divorced and because she is already a regular fixture in the McKeown household, Hannah is invited along on Fern McKeown’s family vacation. It’s just Hannah and Fern, and Fern’s undivorced parents, Monica and Greg. For one July week they lounge around their hotel, spending the glaring afternoons in the shade...

Dear Shadows

December 10, 2019

The last time Katie had talked to Colin Reynolds had been in the spring of 2000 in a sad little rental house with a banana-colored refrigerator, sparse lighting, and abundant water bugs. They’d ended up there on the west end of town after a party. Their conversation—brief, inconsequential yet overinflated—had been a prelude. Soon thereafter,...

The Joke

There’s a joke my grandmother loved to tell that starts with an old man wilting on his deathbed. His friends and family have gathered downstairs to await the inevitable as his wife prepares an elaborate meal for them. The old man hasn’t eaten in days but the scent of potatoes and herring wafts up the...

What Do You Have To Show Me?

Simon was drawn to Pippa’s dating profile because she was pretty—dark eyes and longish brown hair with bangs—and her name sounded like she’d be good in bed. Thirty-four, a year older than Simon, she described herself as a part-time English professor and full-time poet. Googling her he found her poem, “Hannah and Otto,” in a...

Until the Flood Came

December 20, 2018

Molly’s son did not want to talk about his new girlfriend. The two of them were eating dinner, and he was telling a story about a boy who slipped in the cafeteria and sprained his ankle. “And my girlfriend—” he said, and his eyes got real wide and his entire body shut down, his fork...