Then he pops back up. I should stop the match but the kid seems fine, and I’m only a little worried when I blow the whistle again and the boys go back at it. Again, Wham! And Umi is pinned again. And again. And again. And each time I’m sure that he has a busted rib or a ruptured spleen, but each time he gets back up.
Read MoreThrow Rug
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Read MoreThis Is the Moment, Or One of Them
Mia foolishly believed, as the young are wont to do, that she could avoid villainy. The key was to be a good person. Good people aren’t villains. She knew that in her heart, and she knew it because society told her it was so. The road to being good was laid out for her by her mother, religion, and Saturday morning cartoons.
Read MoreThe Life & Death of Mia Fremont: An Interview with a Killer
The sky was the color of iron and the air tasted like iron filings, like blood. It reminded me of Reef’s belt buckle, which made me think about the things he would say and how they never matched the things he did. And how, despite the way he always used God to prop up his reasoning, it still crumbled like a mountain beneath God’s wrath.
Read MoreShe Searches for God in the Storm Within
Everything aches. Her back is tight and knotted at the bottom of her spine, because Keena is in a phase where she wants to be able to look up at her as she’s held. With that thought, Bethesda glances down, peeking under the wrap to see if she’s asleep. Keena dozes, lips parted, cheek smushed against Bethesda’s chest, eyes hooded. Good. Good enough.
Read MoreIf Those Ragged Feet Won’t Run
You know the story. You’ve seen the news clips and the Behind the Music episodes and the biopics: the poor kid from the Chicago projects, her church-obsessed single mom, how Ti spent every spare moment of her childhood there, singing her little heart out. How that safe and stunting space celebrated her, and how it maimed her. How she got on television; how she captured the heart of America from the first moment and didn’t let it go until she died.
Read MoreA Love That Burns Hot Enough to Last: Deleted Scenes from a Documentary
The first god tastes of cardamom and coriander. Its pungent skin is brittle and cracked and breaks like dry seaweed. The seven legs of its impressive mass bend and form great peaks and valleys. Bogs of noxious fumes bubble from its pores. Our programming tells us the god most closely resembles an arachnid to you Earth-raised beings. Imagine a black widow the size of a mountain range, but with skin like yours, tearing open like a burning house. Full of death, and therefore life, rotting and stinking with history.
Read MoreBlack Box of the Terraworms
He spoke once, the words whispered by frozen lips on a face so frostbitten he looked like a porcelain doll. I found him below the summit as our expedition bottlenecked before the Hillary Step on our final ascent of Mount Everest.
Read MoreThe Eight-Thousanders
Three men emerged from darkness and walked to the edge of the wood, the scent of roses rising all around them. The moon hung like a broken jaw above the Memphis night. The schoolyard lay ahead, its wood fence disjointed and leaning. The fetid scent of wet grass, of mold and moss, floated on the evening wind from the bayou.
Read MoreBarefoot and Midnight