The Hours
The Hour Instructing the Boy / How to Show His Mother Love Without Hurting Her or / Damaging the Tubing that Sustains Her. The Hour of Grading Papers / Without (Really) Reading Them, then the Hour of Justifying / This is Just Fine This Once.
Accuracy
You’re obsessed, as your husband might say, and you realize it’s not about the color, silly, it’s how you feel to be exact about something, anything—a feeling, a place, or this color.
In the Valley of Dreams
My affair felt like the smaller transgression, a less-than sign as opposed to an equal to, but that wasn’t the sort of thing you talked about on the side of the road with dust rising like spirits in the heat, fathers rising from the depths of memory.
Nova
She said nothing, placed a hand on his forearm. Already their spirits were shrinking, an unletting of birthday-bright balloons.
Avalon
I know now what it means to be full to bursting with eager limbs, tears, and milk. I know, too, what it means to stretch something open with my own fullness by way of desire.
The Eager Acolyte
Without hesitation, he brings the cup to his fleshy lips, tipping it back, gulping audibly, his Adam’s apple moving like a mouse beneath a blanket. That nothing may be lost.
Inventory of a Love Addict
Now you have a delicate moth clawing its way up your hand. Beneath it, stone fruit, ripe. You think of Persephone. You wonder how much of love ends in transaction, an exchange.
Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy
Baking is precise and often pretty; cooking, more improvisational; I like them both and lose myself that way, which is a life skill and I recommend it.
A Boundary Beyond Which Events Cannot Affect an Observer
I wonder how overpowered you must be to separate electrons from atoms and twirl magnetic fields so high above yourself before snapping them back down until you’ve flared up a Hole of Darkness, like it’s the last spacetime-warping boss of an RPG.
I've Come to Hold the Baby
As Cindy bent over close to make the transfer, she sniffed as she always did. The hints were there, but no more than they always were, allusions emitted from his pores of another world.
Boots
For my own boots, I’d sit on the floor, pull and heave until my boots came off, contorting my legs in ways that tired adults could not, or would not.
Waiting
I think about my mother in the garden hilling green beans, and I asked her if I could go on birth control, and she didn’t say anything, which meant “yes,” which meant “no,” which meant, “I’m hilling beans right now.
Sleeping Giants
she stood with a boot on a ladder that stretched up to nowhere, and with a turned head she looked back at us with blank eyes. It looked like she had decided to leave the earth.
Go-Go Girl
Nestled in, camouflaged, their points jauntily faced the sky, and I knew Glen was right: those boots could never be mine.
An excerpt from “Sotheby’s Says My Country is a Tax Incentive”
Act 20 is grounded to this island in ways I am not. My taproot is rotting. Act 20 has a forest. I am jealous of a law.
Swaddle
She lingered a while, then folded down into a silhouette, onto the metallic chair beside you.
Life Expectancy
In 1944, when my father was just a boy, his dog was sent away and my grandfather lied about it. Something about Sparky being “needed for the war” and special farms for training.
Sitting Quiet
That summer, our other brother stopped showering, and I began swallowing watermelon seeds so one would grow inside me
Summer of Joy
During storms, we like to imagine we’re in a boat at sea, the only ones left alive. That’s when Joey becomes Joy.
Boredom Interrupted
The flies struggle, but I persevere, and after what seems like forever, wings held tight against their bodies, the flies are sliding down the glass on streams of the liquid, like a fatal carnival ride.
Nugget King
“Shut up, Allen,” I say, but Allen’s already standing and holding the black trash bag like a prize. I can smell the garlicky pink sludge starting to thaw inside it.
The Animals They Used to Be
The bones, he knew from a childhood obsession with dinosaurs... would be there forever; or, almost forever—as forever as it mattered.
Mamá Makes a Call to México
Again, mamá will parse what she can and pretend the voice soun ds the same as the voice in her memories across the border
Fake Teeth
We didn’t play Shark Attack anymore after I face-planted on a marble slide and banged my two front teeth.
Pork Fluff
He never did like her cooking and his wife berated him every time he asked for pork fluff to go with his rice.
Infinite Wrecking Ball
"Besides, seventy years seems a sensible lifespan for a wrecking ball," I told the salesman, my face as honest as a dinner plate.
+-
-
Ruminate Community
_____________________________________________
_____________________________________________
The Waking is an online literary magazine and a part of the Ruminate creative community that houses high-quality literary writing about what it’s like to be human. We are interested in short-form prose and image-text hybrid work. This art can be beautiful, it can be strange, we just ask that it feels true.