On the Endangered List
Still, she remembers cradling that tiger of a beetle in their sunny, grassy backyard as the sounds of her parents arguing drove through the kitchen windows. She never saw such an insect again.
Go
His idea is for the train to go into the hills and slow in the woods, and for the boy who’s been lost in the woods to see it, board it, and for the train to go full steam ahead back to town to reunite the boy with his lonely and shaken father.
On the River Trail
Cal and I never figured out a system for who would tuck in behind the other as we approached other cyclists, always fumbled at the last minute with our brakes squealing and gears snagging, tires cutting zigzags across one another as we struggled for balance when moving so slowly, indecisively.
Guts, Mostly
I am thinking about the woman I met, a friend of a friend, who told me how her intestines were removed so her baby could be born.
When She Wears the Mask
When she settles into her chair in a hush, the girl’s dress will ripple across the centerpiece like the tendrils of a jellyfish. She will furl the fabric tight around her legs as her cousins watch from above their bow ties.
Salamanders
They drowned her. That’s what David Attenborough told me in his kind old man, British, storybook way. They drowned her, and that’s just what happens to females sometimes during mating season.
Playlist: Hey Jude
Which is exactly the message your firstborn delivers in the cool blue gaze that sifts right through you: Not only are you not what you thought yourself to be; you are the very opposite of everything you thought you were.
Broken Home
Ten years after the divorce, my mother had saved enough to put a down payment on the turn-of-the-century farmhouse. It is a work in progress, but it is ours.
To Have and To Hold
I lie with Marcia on my side, perfectly still. I want to be with her. I want to be one of her rules.
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.
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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.