Fiction

For centuries, a select group of “Sea Women” were plucked from their families to become deep sea divers of octopus, conch, and abalone. It was considered a high honor to become a Sea Woman, and they were also especially hardy, continuing to dive well into their eighties.

You know she knows that by “your coworker,” you really mean Annie, the head of HR, who assured you during the last meeting, the one where it was strongly recommended that you take some time off, that “there’s no shame in the occasional breakdown.”

I hope my last few emails didn’t scare you. I promise that wasn’t my intention. I figured, if my work is going to send you an automated message about me showing up to your place, I should tell you why, and if I’m going to do that, I should tell you what’s really going on, and it turns out waste being lucid isn’t as impossible as they made it seem in training.

Later my brother and I ate french fries in separate cities, at separate times. As was the natural trajectory of growing up, an arc equally appreciable by Euclid, it was nothing to complain about. There were french fries in cups. french fries alongside fried fish. Fries alone, wrapped in a square of butcher paper.

I finally told her only two months ago, and since then I haven’t stopping talking: about Bonnie, about prison, about death. I tell myself Adela can handle it, that her work is this kind of suffering. She’d tell me if it made her suffer, too.

Every chest of drawers, every sneaker tread, every cigarette lighter—everything with the suggestion of two eyes and a mouth—hosted a secret visitor. Those visitors were the ghosts of the dead, who had no features of their own and therefore borrowed the faces of pot lids and wood knots to peer out at the living.

Snapshot There is a picture of me when I was two, and in it I am playing the piano, fingers splayed, all ten fitting within half an octave. It isn’t framed, nor on display, as in it I am also buck naked, the curve of my back half a breath mark, stark white against the […]

Every corner of the home comforted her with little implicit messages: You are tasteful. You are smart. You are depressed, but it’s glamorous. She tucked herself into a corner of her fashionable grey couch and basked in it.