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
Exclusively available in the print edition of Gulf Coast 33.1
Exclusively available in the print edition of Gulf Coast 33.1
When my uncle, Onoima, returned from South Africa, he did not talk about what he had seen there. He only slept for hours, waking in the middle of the night to shuffle around the kitchen for something …
Around the time he entered the eighth grade, Agustín began to watch pornography on a blue iMac he had salvaged from a dumpster. There was a McDonald’s next door to his apartment building, and he …
When she got a paper cut, that speck seemed newly foreboding—she’d lick it off, heart accelerating, as if to let it pool for even a moment would invite some deviously patient menace.
When I was young and very new to the world, my keeper took me to a place he referred to as the annex, though, since it was not proximate to any other structure, I had a hard time understanding what …
Exclusively available in the print edition of Gulf Coast 32.2
Exclusively available in the print edition of Gulf Coast 32.2
Exclusively available in the print edition of Gulf Coast 32.2
Exclusively available in the print edition of Gulf Coast 32.2
A ship. She’s hanged from the mast. She’s lying on the bed and I’m lying next to her, holding her hand. She talks as though nothing were out of the ordinary.
And the cloud that took over the family’s house that Tuesday wasn’t made of your run-of-the-mill water vapor. It was so humid and heavy you could reach out and shake hands with it, and it would …
Still, she liked what she had become. She slept in a den of sticks of her own making. Language and its judgment escaped her. Was being animal closer to God than innocence? Her voice was her breath. …
The more I looked at her the more she seemed angry. This was probably because I was breaking into John’s computer again.