Mother and the children had never killed before. That was Father’s work. All month long the rain came down, and gray-faced Father coughed in his bed, shrinking into a yellowed quilt. Mother and the …

The first skin I tattooed was orange peel. Supposedly the texture is similar to humans. I bought a kilo of oranges to practice on before you agreed. You came down for the weekend, watched as I tested …

I’m very good at these stories. The bitter-sweet, could-have-been, wish-it-was-so ones that are prettier and more precious than happy-endings. Stories are better cut short, end before it begins, so …

It happened in a matter of seconds, this overlay of violence in my mind, that took us into another life, and then it was gone. Perhaps what I wanted was to have my future thrust upon me. No, I …

She wasn’t after beauty, really—which was what most of the women who sought her out got wrong—she was after women who already knew that pain could be a tunnel and that pleasure could be the …

You’re sore. It’s your shoulders mostly—they hurt from swiping through hundreds of men. Tylers, Johns. Think about sending a message. Then, think about a massage. You have health insurance but …

There is a man in India who is every morning attacked by crows. I heard this on the radio not long ago. This man, he once rescued a crow that had become disoriented in his garden. And since then when …

The man has a gun. He walks into a bank with the gun. He sees himself from the outside, enacting a scene from a movie. He shows the gun to the security guard, who sits down, and he shows the gun to …

She’s there on one of those red-herring March afternoons that make you think spring’s arrived, when everyone pours outdoors gasping, like they’re emerging from underwater. Her parents’ house …

Brigitte watches her mother swat at a mosquito sending ashes from her cigarette into her coarse gray hair. She’s smoked it past the filter, an orange nub in her fingers the size of a peanut. …

We’re filming on the verandah of the Golden Age Movie Ranch in Los Angeles County. 3 AM is my sister. She’s the third attempt in the Audrey-Marilyn series. They call me 7 MH, the seventh in the …

Rachel felt small and held in the green bowl of the clearing beneath the boundless bright sky. She felt a tug in her middle, some big, sweet sadness, and knew she would always feel this way now, no …

For a while I thought maybe something was wrong with me, like you sort of hope there is when you're a teenager.

I let him stand there for a few minutes, waving his arms while he rambled on about the wonderful days of our youth. When he finally fell silent, I told him that I had no idea who he was.

Mom says a white deer means blood is coming. When I sleep, the forest floor is a lake of red, no matter if the deer are white or brown. A gunshot sounds.

By the base of his steps, there was a flower pot with a sad, half-dead plant. She lifted the thing. Felt the small force of its weight against her. Stupid, she knew. But she was a container brimming …

Our boys didn’t come home to the swamp after fighting the North, but James did. He came back with a phantom limb, believing he could feel the clench of the muscles that had been amputated in a …

But in another language, in my father’s mouth, there is a tenderness to the tone he takes, so that the word beat overlaps with other words, some of them meaning I miss you. He says beat as if the …

Exclusively available in the print edition of Gulf Coast 33.1

Exclusively available in the print edition of Gulf Coast 33.1