The questions come like glass and ice. She removes her hair and a piece of her skull---this is all that could ever protect me---and the brain beneath is pulsing and pink and white. Later, in his dreams, he tells the other bodies that there was yellow, too: the...

  Lackadaisical cries, and the morning is open. Outside, the world is still dark, but in here---through the neighbor’s walls---I hear the earth turning. She is small, perhaps three, and I can imagine her in the small purple pajamas I saw when the family first...

  The myth begins with gray fur and yellow-moon eyes. The teeth. First, there are whispered sightings, dismissed into the neighboring water. * Next, the discovery of cattle bones, picked clean, the bodies having disappeared days before. The farmers are not...

  “I’m not committed to life,” she said and her body was ash beneath the moon. She ate a pomegranate down to its last seed, took a breath and confessed. Pumpkin seeds tasted like water now. She often dreamed of swallowing an entire swing so that she might take...

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  As a child, she was terrified of birds. After watching The Birds, she went outside with her shoulders hunched and eyes looking down. One night, in her dreams, she thought the piranha and the pterodactyl were also birds. When she awoke, they were—and all the...