What I know: She had mouth cancer and hadn’t eaten for days. I saw her once take a hot dog cold out of the fridge and eat it standing in the corner of the kitchen, facing the wall. It made her gag.

I know she had been quietly waiting for his return. I know it in the way she went about her work, calm and fidgety at the same time. Peeling potatoes, gouging out the eyes, scrubbing the dining room floor, hauling the neighbor man’s laundry up the alley, a wicker basket swaying on her hip.

I know it in the way she pulled my ponytail too high and tight, until my temples ached, and said, come straight home after school. I need you to watch Boggy. She wound the ponytail into a knot at the top of my head, asked, why are you still standing there, looking like a Chinaman.

You should have seen her bottom lip, then, outsized, the color of raw steak, as if it had been punched every day of her life.

When I got home, Boggy was in his high chair, wailing, pounding the tray with his fists. Bits of mashed carrot flecked the wall. When I pulled him out of the chair, his diaper hung like a sandbag to his knees. Boggy smelled like floodwater, like worms, like the ammonia she used to clean the windows.

Boggy and I sprawled on her bed watching the Democratic National Convention and the neighbors in the next apartment were watching Green Acres and I ate Bugles wearing my baby doll pajamas and the curtains lifted and brushed my cheek and Boggy stuck his finger up my nose. I wanted to marry Bobby Kennedy and have twelve or thirteen babies with him. Like Ethel did.

I know she left her cigarettes behind. An open pack of Virginia Slims— menthol—on the kitchen counter. After I put Boggy in his crib, I sat on the stoop, watching the rain, and taught myself to smoke, one cigarette at a time.

What I don’t know is where she went that night. Who she saw, what she did, if she ever found my father, or if she was even looking for him. I don’t know why she abandoned our Ford Falcon somewhere on Fourth Street, so far from home. Maybe it was only a matter of wanting to see for herself, of wanting to get just a little bit closer, to find out what raindrops do to the soft flowing surface of a river.

His friends called him Jay, because he worked up with the birds. Jay rode skyscraper skeletons, where New York was flickering itself sullenly into being. A taste of steel lived in Jay’s mouth, scars on his arms, and no room anywhere. His world was girders, lines, oil.“Frosty,” they called him. He didn’t understand what love felt…

Seeing the curled photo of his mother and daughter in the small trash receptacle beside his daughter’s desk caused Tom’s stomach to seize. He bent over and retrieved the picture before sitting gently on Lisa’s bed, careful not to awaken her.The photo had been taken less than a year before his mother’s death. In it, Lisa…

July 3rd on a thin strip of land in Arizona; I remember how I’d leaned in to kiss you on the right side of our bed. Your absence was heavy. Savage. But I felt your presence in the atmosphere so I traced back the covers. (You loved violence and science.)And as I re-awoke I wandered to…

Thank you Thank you for your service Thank you for going Thank you for coming back Thank you for not dying Thank you for taking the bullet, the mortar round, the shrapnel that is making its way to your heart by micromillimeters every year Thank you for eating that god-awful food gritted with sand so we…

At first it is no more than a curiosity satisfied. The fleshiness of verdigris: sour, like licking blood. The new-grass bite of funicular. The prickle of a full-stop.But the boy Edward soon becomes ravenous. Schoolbooks prove reliable, if uninspired, sources. Those from the daily paper, once his father is done with it, tend to be a little dry-mouthed,…

“Green. Your shoulder, Green.”“You worry too much, Blue.”“Don’t call me that.”“Sure, Blue. Whatever you say.”“You should get it looked at.”“Alright, calm down, I’ll get it looked at.” “Now?”“Nah. I got a date.”Blue scowled. Blue’s given name was Chris, but no one called him that. It was all Green’s fault. He thought it was funnier this…

“She had pantyhose drying on the towel rack. Just pantyhose with little wrinkly feet, out to dry. But she wasn’t one of those crazy chicks with bras in the dishwasher. Thank God.” He put down his drink. The square wooden table was glossed over, like his hair, like the two melting ice cubes, like his eyes. The…

A Long Lookby Alex CanbyForty-three, Richard paints his first self-portrait. Wife and kids are gone for the weekend. Large mirror to his left, canvas to his right. Shoulders, neck, the shape of his head, and hairline look perfect. The face is blank and beige. His head hangs, face in hand. Warm tears, slick on his palm…

It had been fifty-three minutes. As Paco’s phone vibrated, pamphlets and publications shuffled and scattered across the coffee table’s surface, breaking the silence that engulfed the room. All of the seats in the waiting room were empty with the exception of two across from him, filled by a middle-aged Jewish couple. All but slivers of the…

She remembers light moving fast in spidery fractals across the floral patterns of her sundress—nine or ten years old and her father was however old her being nine or ten made him. The fractals of light danced across space and spheres between leaves and through the shatterproof glass of the Volkswagen onto his cheek, knuckles at…

I’m beautiful, I’m told. I am the blind woman biting off a piece of the sky to see if it tastes as blue as advertised. “Smile, Bev!” they order, their voices the same sound as the snapping shutters and fussy sequins against milky skin. “You’ve been working out! Those arms are hot!”My beauty is mercenary. The…