When you awoke this morning, you were a boy. But tonight you’ll retire to your racecar bed a grown-ass man with hair on his chest. Assuming you don’t singe it off first ha ha.

in her sleepless room with the shades drawn and a bowlful of neon peach rings. Blue TV light is radioactive, but after years of exposure, Jenny’s skin has grown a thick, radio-proof layer. It is gummy to the touch. 

August 3 is most well known in the United States as The Day When Nothing Happened. In the United Kingdom and the European Union and parts of Eastern Europe, it is also known as Nothing Day. The Day has never been recognized for unique remembrance in Canada, as it has never been determined to be remarkable. 

The Virgin girls are not virgins. The Virgin girls are not virgins—not yet. They are here to redo themselves and reassemble their youth.

“I’m tired of having created the world,” said the boy with the snow-soft hair. 

Though he was, as a child on the cusp of thirteen, the youngest of the group, he was also the eldest.

I worked with Soraya before she was famous – back in ’93 when she was 14 years old, 6 foot 2 and size 0 –  with ankles and wrists so snappable, so daddy-long-legged, she looked like she could crawl up a wall and live on the ceiling.

Somewhere along the coast, a man buys a house swollen with light – on the abandoned street, but it’s all he can afford. His agent mentions thestunning view, proximity to cliffs. Some maids have left the home smelling of lavender & bleach.

Nothing seemed off until I was fourteen years old, eating handfuls of soil straight from the bag. My mom caught me one day with brown flecks in my braces and called the doctor.

I imagine my mother, at twenty five, a petite brunette with giant hazel eyes. I can picture her hanging upside down off the edge of her queen-sized bed, blood rushing to her head, the way she told me it did.

The police divers brought up the ATV.
Later our father restored it to its original condition.
The divers kept finding Jack’s things under the water.
They brought up his smile with its oversized tooth.

Gene could hear the phone ringing inside the trailer as he fumbled with the lock he kept meaning to fix. It was probably one of the stepmothers changing something. He wasn’t in the mood to talk to any of them. Let the machine take it.

We stole eggs from the refrigerator      
instead of the chicken coop—maybe      
we wanted to test if our parents will      
notice. They don’t.

Like fireflies, our faces

glow from the TV light

that night in June. We shoot Jack

until the burn dies,

bottle left with nothing

to claim.

I’m chasing after my older sister, Shelly – I’m the sheriff, she’s the gold thief – when all of a sudden she stops cold in her tracks and I can tell by the stiff, near vertical tilt of her body that something is wrong.

Ruba wandered into Michael’s bedroom. “I want to help,” she said, without knowing what her brothers had in mind.

They all three heard the baby cry from the kitchen down the hall.

“Ruba can be the librarian,” Fletcher said.

When they first fall, crabapples glow in the grass.

They fit in fists like rocks.

The first taste is sour at the curled edges

Of the tongue, but with time sweetness seeps up.