
Given a year adrift on the cold Pacific, the broken cities arrive crushed, splintered, with all that the water upended and carried out to sea, all that we might gather from the waves washing in to the iceplant dunes along the California coast. So, too, the dead, who float upside down in the silent wreckage…

I want to scream into the hearing aid nestled in his ear, Where is your fist? Thick-throated men in black coats scurry to the windows of the suite, scour the landscape with slitted eyes, estimate the arc of bullets. They move me from one chair to another to another until I am sitting so close…

My new shirts are small and tight, like something a teenager would buy. I wore one to the grocery store last night and imagined someone handsome and bold would stare at me in the frozen food aisle as I reached for a pizza or a gallon of ice cream.


Teege Braune reads a story about a deranged man who can’t stop seeing a Cheshire cat.