Frankie loves to jump on the couch. Not just little hops, but wild, airborne leaps that make the cushions buckle and the frame groan. She throws her arms up, lands hard, then scrambles to do it again. Her joy is boundless, contagious.But when I tell her to stop, to get down, to please be careful, she just laughs. A bright, delighted laugh, as if we’re playing a game I forgot we started. She doesn’t understand the words, If you fall, you’ll get hurt. They’re too abstract. Too far removed from wha…

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The aquarium sat by the register, a glass cube gone cloudy with years of grease and cigarette smoke. Algae filmed the corners, and the filter rattled like it might give out at any second. I always chose the booth across from it, the one with vinyl patched in duct tape, so I could watch the fish drift in slow, half-hearted circles.

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The headline says my father baptized an alligator in the fountain outside Publix. FLORIDA MAN SAVES GATOR’S SOUL, STORE SECURITY NOT IMPRESSED.Someone cropped his face and added a halo. Someone else turned him into a Saint candle. A TikTok kid looped his prayer over a trap beat. The clip shows Dad in his church suit, cuffs rolled, shoes off, water rising around his shins. One hand on the gator’s back, the other raised to heaven. The gator looks half asleep. The crowd cheers. A manager waves a mop…

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The road runs straight as a taut string. On both sides, fields make a green and white quilt. Cotton blooms into fists. Corn lifts thin flags that clatter in the wind. Summer heat shakes the edges of the asphalt. Vultures wheel overhead and settle on fence posts like sentries who do not blink. I drive this road often. Groceries. Daycare pickup. Library returns. A loop of errands that feels safe until it does not. The first time I noticed the bodies, I was late for work. A raccoon lay with its paws…

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The one-hour photo smelled of vinegar and metal, the scent clinging to the back of my throat like it might stay there forever. My hands sweated inside the sleeves of my windbreaker as I slid the yellow Kodak envelope across the counter. The clerk, a man with nicotine-stained fingers, tore the seal with his teeth, holding the flap open like it was a wound. He flipped through the stack without looking at me, his mouth tight. “Most of these didn’t turn out,” he said. His voice was flat but no…

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Toilet Bowl Funeral The first time Goldie died, my father flushed him without ceremony. “Quick and painless,” he muttered. I leaned over the bowl, watching the orange body spiral down. My mother ruffled my hair and said, “That’s life,” before boiling spaghetti. But the next morning, Goldie was back. He filled the toilet tank, scales brushing porcelain, one cloudy eye staring at me as if we’d both made a mistake. My father cursed but could not bring himself to flush again. “He wants somethi…

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Feeds: PO AD LIB. It appeared one morning in blue ink on her whiteboard, just below her weight and care times—another piece of coded hospital language I wasn’t meant to understand. Another mysterious acronym in a sea of them, bobbing somewhere between hope and heartbreak. I stared at those three words for a long time. After five weeks of bracing myself for bad news and interpreting every beep, chart, and monitor, here was a phrase so quiet I nearly missed it. In the NICU, everything meant something, and anything could mean everything. Where one small change could unravel everything or…

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Every Christmas, we dress a rented mannequin and call it Uncle Ray. It comes from a party store off the highway, boxed in cardboard soft with grease. The tag reads DISPLAY UNIT. HANDLE WITH CARE. The clerk knows us now. He slides the box across the counter without a word, as if silence is part of the rental. The first year, it was a joke. Dad said, “We need someone to carve the ham.” Mom propped the blank white body at the head of the table and tucke…

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Every December my family brings out the mannequin and dresses it in Uncle Ray’s flannel, boots, and watch, a winter ritual that began as a joke and softened into something we never named after he died. Tonight, the candles burn low on the dining table, their light thin as breath, and when everyone drifts to the living room, I stay behind in the hush, facing the figure we’ve filled with his things. The coat still carries a trace of cedar and cigarette smoke. The watch on its wrist ticks with a borrowed steadiness, the kind that makes you listen harder…

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January presses down on West Palm Beach as a dull lid. The cold is a stranger here. It creeps under the fairground gates and sits in the metal of the rides. The sky carries the color of wet cement. The midway lights try to punch holes in it and fail. I come an hour before dusk with my mother’s wristwatch in my pocket. The band broke last week and the crystal bears a crack through the face. The second hand still moves. The tick hides under the noise until I press the watch to my ear.

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The state says the boxes are obsolete. That is the word on the work order clipped to my visor. OBSOLETE in block letters, as if the road itself signed off on it. I park on the shoulder and pull on gloves that still smell like last week’s fuel spill. The call box stands ten feet off the asphalt, sun-bleached yellow gone to the colour of old teeth. A little blue sign above it reads EMERGENCY with an arrow no one follows anymore.

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The first time I heard the story, I was eight. My uncle whispered it after supper while we swatted mosquitoes and picked fish bones clean. “The Skunk Ape lives where the swamp doesn’t end,” he said, pointing toward the cypress line where the sky thickened into night. “Smells like death. Walks like a man, only larger. Red eyes if you catch the light right.” I laughed the way children laugh at warnings, but I remembered how his finger trembled when he drew the cross…

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The first thing my mother left me was a jar. Wide-mouthed, Mason glass, cloudy at the rim. She pressed it into my hands the morning she stopped speaking. Her lips moved like pale paper fluttering in the wind. “Keep it closed,” she mouthed. Inside: a moth, its gray wings frantic against the glass. Dust fell in tiny storms, coating the sides in a powdery script I couldn’t read. The air inside shimmered faintly, as if it carried a pulse of its own. I carried it home, tucked agains…

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The bell above the jewelry store door gives a soft chime as I step inside. The sound feels too gentle for what I have come to do. Rain slides down the glass behind me, distorting the lights of the parking lot. The air smells of polish and metal. Under the bright display cases, diamonds gleam like trapped lightning, each one waiting for someone to believe in it.

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The day after Mary Ellen was arrested, Mama made biscuits and gravy. I woke to the smell of bacon grease popping in the skillet, thick and salty, mixed with something heavier—flour catching on cast iron. The air already felt thick, even with the windows cracked. I slipped on my Sunday dress, the pale blue one with the peter-pan collar and padded barefoot through the hallway. The fan in the living room pushed warm air around like it was doing something. The linoleum in the kitchen was cool, cracked at the corners. My bare heels stuck to it when I walked.

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You were twenty-fourwhen your brain went silent.No dreams.No waking. But still they kept you warmbeneath the weight of wires,your skin bathed in fluorescent blue,your breath machine-fed. Not for you.For the small, curled possibility inside.They called it life,but what they meant was labor. They turned your bodyinto a hushed roomwithout windows,without voice. A vessel.A holding cell.Your name was Adriana.Say it aloud.Adriana Smith. Not “the mother.”Not “the mira…

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I scattered him at Bathtub Beach just after sunrise, the tide curling warm around my ankles. I parked beside a dune tangled with sea oats and lifted the urn from the passenger seat. Its metal was slick with condensation, cold against my palms, as if I carried something still alive. The horizon split orange, soft and sharp at once. I stepped onto the limestone shelf where he used to squat with a bucket of shrimp and a cigarette tucked behind his ear. He never caught much, but he’d sit for hours, talking tides and mangrove snapper, swearing you could smell…

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The night shift at the rest stop smells of diesel and boiled peanuts. The vending plaza hums behind me, its fans and fluorescent lights working harder than the people inside. I sweep the tiled floor in small arcs, the broom whispering over chip crumbs and cigarette ash. The mop bucket waits beside the door, metal dented, water clouded by a day of other people’s shoes. A paper map curls on the brochure rack, its folds cutting Florida clean through the gulf.

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There’s glitter in the sidewalk. Still. Years later. It’s pressed into the cracks like it grew there. Like joy tried to root itself in the concrete and stayed. I kneel beside it, careful not to disturb.

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He used to make her omelets on Sundays. Mushrooms, green peppers, cheese grated thin. He called it his specialty. He poured coffee into her cup before his own and kissed her forehead through the steam. She used to think that meant love. The whisk against the bowl, the scrape of the spatula, the sound of him humming while she sat barefoot in the kitchen. Love had a sound back then. Now the whisk means she is late. He comes home at six. Always six. She has fifteen minutes to get…

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The faucet in the laundry room had been leaking for weeks. Slow, consistent, an off-beat metronome tapping out the things he hadn’t gotten around to. Kyle didn’t mind it anymore. The drip kept him company when the house got too quiet. He sat at the kitchen table in his work boots, eating a bowl of cornflakes gone soft. It was nearly noon, and the sun cut a sharp line across the floor. He stared at the wall beside the fridge, where the paint peeled like bark. He could fix it. He had the tools.

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