The window of Albrecht’s bedroom looked out onto the stone wall of the abandoned building next door. The buildings were separated by an alley so narrow that Albrecht could reach out his window and by stretching hard touch the wall. Albrecht was bothered by how this other building intruded on his apartment. It’s not right, he thought. He told old Mrs. Lopez, who lived in the apartment beneath his, that the two buildings never should have been built so closely together. He was

When I was still very young—before I started school—the first thing I saw when I opened the front door of our home was the front door of the Abu Qasem family residence across our very narrow street. It wasn’t really a street, more like a footpath—it wasn’t wide enough for even a single car to traverse. The Abu Qasem’s son, Qasem, was my older sister Heba’s friend. He was her age; the two of them were two years older than I. He used to play with me because he liked to be aroun

Thrill-Spike I once lived in a rudely converted horse barn. I was paper, my hands were paper, my Underwood-Olivetti was centered on my desk. Now I live in an apartment in the city. I’m a digital man, and there are no horses outside my window, no manure, no dirt. I live a thoroughly clean environment. Feelings slide off my laptop screen and fly directly down the rubbish chute. The rubbish shoot has no smell. No cooking smells flavor our hallways. I remember the beat poets. I r

The year was 1936. I was seven years old. My family like millions of other families was caught in the monstrous tentacles of the depression. We were living in a four-floor walk-up on East Forty-Fifth Street in Brooklyn. It must have been sometime in the spring that my mother told me and my three older sisters - - at seventeen, Silvia was the oldest, Roslyn was a year younger and Gail was either fourteen or fifteen - - that we would be moving in a few days to a six-floor walku

There’s a statue that quietly ornaments my small town. I only notice it tonight because of the rain. It’s a bronze man sitting astride a muscular horse, his feathered headdress falling down his back, his arms outstretched and head tilted to the sky, embracing the droplets that roll off his bare chest and glisten like sweat. I drive to the address Clair gave me, glad for the rain so no one at the party will notice my own sweat. I wipe my brow and look at the dashboard clock, n

(This impactful piece comes with a content warning for discussion of domestic abuse and use of slurs.) I started really leaving the last time you called me cunt. I would have stayed in bed when I heard the breaking, let you wear yourself out with your anger, but I remembered an anecdote about some poet trying to commit suicide by walking on broken glass. It was something about the shards working their way into veins and floating up from bare feet to a beating heart. I don’t k

We are each a prisoner of some design or other. I, for instance, reside eternally in the back of his mind, whispering something he can hear only when he squints his eyes and scrunches his cheeks. I am whispering, “I will forget you.” I am whispering, “I have moved on, I now live and sleep and breathe more easily over in a corner of the universe in which I feel more safe.” I am whispering, “I never needed you, no matter how hard you tried to convince me I did.” He, for his par

After the Wreckage, the bathroom I share with my younger sister Maya is no longer a warzone. Between unpainted toenails I can make out the ghosts of bloodstains on the caulking, stuck between the pale tile. Run my hands over the windowsill where I tried cutting the wood instead of my skin and took off paint with desperate hands needing to release emotion and emotion and emotion. I don’t look through the drawers because Maya has reclaimed them since I left for college, but now

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A Little Something for the Dead The small garden was full of flames and fabric. Lizzy’s Mother had made the lanterns herself. They had started out as twigs and bits of the clothes that Lizzy had grown out of. They didn’t have vegetables to spare for lanterns. The washing her mother had had to take in hung in the garden too. White sheets, floating like ghosts, glowed in the lantern’s soft, warm light. Lizzy watched a tiny flame dance dangerously behind her old nightdress. She

The Spirits Who Watch Us I grew up in a haunted house. It’s not so bad, it’s not like what they depict in the movies, all possession and nightmares and slamming doors (although that did happen once). It’s more like there’s something in your house that’s trapped there, confused and lost, trying to communicate to someone, anyone, so that they can gain a tether in the darkness. Something familiar that they can latch onto, some sign of life in the ether. In church we were taught

The Frankenstein's Monster Monologues People often ask me if I sleep and I tell them, yes, but standing up like a horse. Sometimes, I try find a wall, or a tree, or a large boulder to lean up against. I certainly don’t sleep in a coffin like that idiot Dracula. I would get too claustrophobic in there. I like roaming around free in green grassy fields, also like horses. I like wandering through the countryside at night and looking up at the stars. These days I’m often confused

The Postcard and the Prescription He received a postcard from his sister in the mail that afternoon. The glossy front depicted the twin founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, suckling from the teats of the she-wolf. He pondered a theory remembered from a college elective on Ancient History. Linguistic evidence linked the she-wolf to an ancient sex worker who took pity on the twins. Tenderness and compassion threaded delicately into the violent tapestry of Roman foundation myths

Matthew A few years ago, I was living in Somerville and freelancing. The work was uneven: I would spend weeks doing nothing, and then three jobs would come in at once. I was exhausted by boredom, and then I was exhausted by work. ​ It was the first week of January—dark and dry and freezing. A cold front had come in, but there was no snow, and the sun set at four in the afternoon. I had no work, and I needed work. I spent my days emailing clients, asking them for new proje

Beloved I visited the cemetery every day for a month, holding vigil at the same grave, repeatedly running my fingers over the word "Beloved" on the headstone. I was there even when the sky ripped itself apart and poured agony. I didn't feel it anyway. The once bare mound sprouted grass, a reminder that time didn't stop to mourn any death. The white lilies left on the day of the funeral had long ago browned and shriveled and turned to dust. I didn't replace the flowers, instea

The Virus Barbara knew her son had caught ‘the virus’: the sudden weight loss, the paling skin and bloodshot eyes; those symptoms, plus his sudden mood-swings and new-found fondness for lying in bed all day with the blinds down, and the not eating, were dead giveaways. She’d hoped, at first, that she was wrong, that it was drugs or anorexia, or some other ailment that could be reversed in time with a bit of medical help; but when she came across the sketchbook showing the se

Pit Stop Five years ago, in the sticky damp heat of an Atlanta summer, I learned that humans are not alone in the universe. Listen. I know. I know how it sounds. But I saw what I saw, and I swear every word I'm about to tell you is true. It was a Thursday, just after ten o’clock in the evening. I had ordered dinner at one of those throwback carhop drive-ins that litter the south, and was killing the wait time paging through a battered paperback of Bradbury shorts by the phosp

Ribbit By the time Riley and Bella made it to the Cranes’ house, their pink pillow cases of candy dragged against the sidewalk. Illuminated by the porch lantern was a frog-shaped wicker basket as high as the girls’ waists. Ping pong balls with markered on pupils had been crammed into the eye sockets. Inside its potbelly were king size Snickers. The sign said, “Please take one each.” Riley tilted her witch’s hat. A last minute costume filched from her mother after she decided