You know how TVs have advanced so far they show details better than real life? A giraffe at the zoo seems unrealistic and vague, like you expect it to have more pixels or something. Well, that’s how the Nebraska sky operates.

The lemon of the kiss loitered on Seena’s lips so long that she thought of dangerous things. Maybe she could stay a little past the first yellow leaf, before the dew even iced over.

Reda hunched in her chair in the bright, cheery restaurant, her mouth dry, clenching her fists. A bear might as well have been lumbering towards her, the way her chest flip-flopped with nerves. She had no excuse. 

Rayla discovered the jacket in the back of a Salvation Army sale. Its camo green had faded to a dingy brown. Good enough for 50 cents. She tried it on, shoving her gloved hands into the pockets.

She touched someone’s fingers.

The rose unfolded another petal across the Atlantic. Another wave of heat, killing all in its path. But she felt nothing from so far away. The space station elevator room ran a little chilly.

“I was a Russian code breaker in ’73,” Merina said. “You think dog is hard to figure out? You’ve been barking for 45 minutes.”

These geese, man, they hunt /

In feral packs, snakes stacked /

On top of chicken breasts /

Kodi had always known the distance between himself and the nearest pie.

We are made with laughter and bones.

The chainsaws do not stop.

Perhaps they can’t. Maybe hell contracted them to torture me, otherwise I might enjoy an average purgatory week working from home with just the yappy dogs next door to superimpose irritation.

The number creatures—the Ints—wiggled on her screen, wringing their serifs, and shuffling in the small spaces between themselves. Deana knew how they felt.

“Haikus wrap themselves /
around Mona Lisa’s smile”

Catherine didn’t much care for her job. It wasn’t that the squirrels gave her any lip. They had dental plans, 401Ks, and the whole caboodle after all. The Sound, though, that gave her the shudders.

Sometimes in the night, when the dogs stopped barking at the cars along Route 40, the house ceased settling, and the wind came to a rest in the branches of the old maple by the farmhouse, Rachel sensed them.

Evelyn was on the way to her big meeting with the department heads, but the box of kittens on the side of the road read ‘take what you can’ and what was a middle-aged woman to do? Leave them? 

​Of course the freaking not.