Ascension by Olivia Payne
When they came to fetch me, they came with nets dragged behind them. I watched them getting slower and slower as they went, their backs bending and their heads down,…
When they came to fetch me, they came with nets dragged behind them. I watched them getting slower and slower as they went, their backs bending and their heads down,…
Emily, a divorced high school teacher whose ex-husband gambled away their retirement fund, whacked me in the chest with a baseball bat. “Harder. Like Barry Bonds” “Who?” “Nevermind. Just swing…
Don’t wear the little green dress, the one we bought you for your sixteenth birthday. The one that matches your eyes. The one I joked about. “Nice, but where’s the…
Erika shaves her head late Sunday evening. Thick black ringlets clog the sink. Dust the floor. Curl against one another like fists. Erika feels neither heavier nor lighter minus the…
He was still waiting, long after the funeral director had left. A shadow of a man sitting at the furthest pew from the altar. Mrs Martin came in late to…
Back then, I didn’t notice things. And I didn’t take them personally. The cracked brown linoleum. The china cabinet filled with gimcrack treasures. The strip of ink-black mildew under the…
The way she remembers it can’t be the way it happened, but it’s the way it creeps into her dreams, soundless and in filtered blue-green light. She floats, anchored by…
When my father was fifty-one, he had a son, Christopher, with his much younger second wife Amanda. Chris got everything my sister and I didn’t have: private school, saxophone lessons,…
What if your mother was the woman next door, who has dinner ready at six for her kids, who doesn’t have to call them home, to tell them she has…
Precocious children start changing around the age of eight or nine. You’ll see first tufts of fur emerge as their limbs begin to lengthen, as bodies stretch and grow. Stroke…
The final curve of a sweeping staircase, rubble and debris littering each step. An empty room, no footprints but mine in the muck that covers the floor. The scattered corpses…
Once googling people became possible, I googled him every couple of years or so, in odd idle moments, or at times when I was about to undergo, or had just…