Category: Fiction

The pump jack on the horizon reflects sunlight so brightly, it could be an x-ray shining through flesh. It unsettles me, so I fumble for the sun visor. A truck passes to my left, and my car sways. I try to keep my eyes straight. I know this highway and its pump jacks, but I can’t resist another look at this one.

The light’s already changed; that’s how it is on the prairie. . . .

The boy in his Sunday clothes stared at the pelicans scattered blackly on the shore like slick and globous stones, right where the monster had left them. He remembered them flying in great lines above the oil rigs at dawn, dropping singly into the ocean like Saint Peter in his doubt and then floating fishful and satisfied, as though everything had been resolved. . . .

April was the first to go. April had always brought the snowmelt, soft rains, herbs gathered in armfuls from the alpine meadows. But that year, there were no rains, no herbs; the streets stayed slick with dirty ice. March dragged on, but couldn’t bridge the gap. It stuttered out fifteen days late, halfway through the hollow April left. Then came fifteen days of . . .

As Blue Speck scuttled through the forest, Keddi leaped over roots and rocks to follow. Fungus, she thought, when the scrabbler halted near a tree with broad leaves and turned over the greenish earth faster than a shovel. The creature stepped aside to reveal a trove of pink whorls, which she lifted out, leaving behind a few tendrils to grow into a new cluster. Together . . .

“Dramatic Exit?” the man in the gray suit asks, pointing to the stingray leather menu as I shake a cocktail longer than necessary, fingers numb from frost fuzzing up the steel. Turquoise light ripples across his face from the water above us, the sun a lazy disco ball far above the dome.

Behind him, Onda watches us from her floor-to-ceiling saltwater tank in the . . .

Alone on a lonely beach, Júlia watched the Atlantic Ocean spit out the world’s richest man.

Júlia knew who the man was even before the sea placed the body at her feet. She knelt before him and stared into his empty orbits and sought the corals. She saw none.

“Of course,” she whispered. “They wouldn’t want anything to do with you.”

Now our work begins, she imagined . . .