Fiction

‘Is that common?’ I ask Lee during a lull in the conversation. ‘Hurling cabbages over with catapults?’

‘What, you don’t have catapults in Myanmar?’ Lee quips. ‘Or cabbages?’

‘Well, we use coconuts,’ I say, and the audience laughs. 

‘What, for catapults?’ 

Rod jumps in. ‘Ignore him, Thandar. You haven’t been in the U.K. for very long, have you?’

‘I arrived about four years ago,’ I tell him. ‘Bit of a culture shock.’

Jeanie’s friends show her videos of dance recitals and flag football games, and she oohs and aahs in all the right places, but the goddamn grandbabies are getting on her nerves. She wants it to be her turn.

She had no idea why her mother had an envelope of 1960s lesbian wedding photos. She sold them on eBay to a collector, who gave them to a historian, who asked around and found me, blah blah blah. I am so young I am a different person, in my tailored shift dress and my hair up in a twist. But the photos could be of any couple, it wouldn’t matter. My wife will never see them.

My sluggish-with-death brain puts it together: Devine is making an episode about me. My ghost.

I have only one desire: that some of my stolen eggs will be used to make commercial mayonnaise.

Immediately after graduating from Purdue University with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, I underwent a surgical procedure in order to invert my body in such a manner that most of my internal organs would be carried on the outside of my skin.

The inside of the home smelled like dust and loneliness. Like when the last owners left, the house never expected anyone new to come live in it.

I wonder what he sees. Does he see me in these eyes? Does he see a reflection of his own nature? Or does he just see an ugly coyote? Whichever it is, he doesn’t try to shove me away. Air whistles through the hole in his neck.