It’s peak season and all the snowbirds are here, trying to escape the horror of the outside, for the last few weeks the smell of decayed ocean life has fallen like a curtain of death.
The Rusalki wait outside my window every night. White lips, grotesque smiles, green hair streaming with silver fish and lily pads. It’s like being in an aquarium. The Rusalki point and jeer through the glass. They tap on the frosted panes with icicle fingernails.
Days passed and I feared she would sleep forever. That the hospital had put her under a sleeping curse. I told Anne my theory that some doctors were witches, some were fairy godmothers...
“Your prepper’s pantry will be the building block of your family’s survival system,” the page begins. “Have you read our guide, ‘37 Items to Hoard Before a Crisis’? If so, the list below of essentials to stockpile will likely be familiar to you.” Martha has not read the guide, and she’s no stranger to crisis.
I started feeding the stray cats when I moved in with him. To attract company, I began leaving food and water by the front door. Fuck Off was the first cat to frequent our patio...
As a punk band from Tampa
we were treated like kicked sand—
a nuisance and a bother
to be brushed aside
or shoved off the stage as fodder
for mosh pit marauders
and their skinhead soldiers
down front—that shit happened, no lie.
On the morning of the Inevitable Event, one hundred and eighty adolescents––the early comers, twitching like feral cats at the long mica tables of the cafeteria, heads bowed to handhelds––stiffened in synchrony, reflexively, like an orchestra tensing to the lift of a conductor's baton.
A troupe of Russian dwarves retired from the circus to found a community built to their scale in South Florida. They purchased land off the Tamiami Trail bordering an endless plain of flooded sawgrass and called it Sweetwater, a mistranslation of the Seminole name for the same swamp.