Eat the grapes, or the plums. Leave the bananas,his mother said. Bananas were only for special occasions.When he went to someone’s home,if offered bananas, he wasn’t supposed to take them.It was considered rude, his mother had told him.They are too much. Now, in America, bananas are commonplace.To me, they aren’t even one of the better fruits.He eats them sometimes,but you can tellhe doesn’t really knowwhat to do with them. I never liked bananas.When I was a kid, I turned my nose up at …
I was using my fingerto shoot imaginary bulletsat the starswhen one of themfell from the sky the next daythere was a black craterwhere the dog park had beenand the obliterated remainsof a cat or two when no one was aroundI took the offending weaponand threw itinto the deepest partof the river I am confidentthe fish will destroyany trace of the evidencejust as soon as they have finisheddining on my eyes Suzanne Verrall lives in Adelaide, Australia.Her flash fiction, essays and …
For Sam You talked about the light hung at the end of the pier being muzzled by dense fog, but I saw a suspension bridge ending in cloud, such thatit wasn’t clear if the bridge cut through the cloud or if the cloud cut into the bridge, which connected the dotsto my advice on eradicating the ants in your apartmentby tracing their trail to its start and fogging it with perfume just there so that the ants, finding their pheromones overwhelmed by wall cloud, would not know whether forging …
After Kay Sage We begin with the myth of potential, end with a horizonof blank canvases stretching into infinity. I've done what was asked of me, and lost interest in everythingthat boasts a beginning and end, a discernible form. Sometimes I close my eyes and imagine a swarmof pastel suits and pretty bonnets spilling over green lawns, laughter overflowinglike champagne as my studio goes dark and I slip into a private, perpetual Easter. The opposite of beautyis not what people …
I’m so sorry. We didall we could. Another mothermight cut off all her hair. I grow mine longand longer. When I lean forward,it cups my face like a lover’s hands.I’m in St. Francis’s cave praying on my kneesin the dark: tell me what to do.I am nine again under the dining room table,peering out through a wall of laceat my father’s high black shoe.He never told us what he did in France,if he killed anyone. He had thick wavy hairlike my son’s. Mine’s poker …
My son returned a month after the funeral. He was sleeping sweetly in his bed. I wanted to wake him right away. I wanted to shake him gently and to hold him against my body, while telling him how much I had missed him and loved him. But I didn’t dare. What if he were actually dead, again? What if he vanished the second I touched him? I sat on the edge of his bed and looked at the crown of his head, where his hair swirled, at the backs of his stick-out ears, at the nape of his neck. The covers …