Three Shorts
Leah Dawson
Lunar Flesh
Your daughter wraps her arms around your waist and asks, Does everyone have a skeleton inside?
Already dinner is on the table. Brown rice, sticky rice, ginger duck, little saucers
Lunar Flesh
Your daughter wraps her arms around your waist and asks, Does everyone have a skeleton inside?
Already dinner is on the table. Brown rice, sticky rice, ginger duck, little saucers
Moonlight hiccups through the dirty windows, jumps around on our faces as the truck hits potholes. We’re already gone, smoking cigarettes.
It has been two and a half months since I’ve seen anyone other than Evan, my new baby, and my husband, not counting the rotating cast of delivery drivers who balance the occasional jumbo box of diapers on the top of the fence post by the gate.
He joins the queuing customers. He’d read the overhead menu when he drew closer. In the meantime he’d twiddle with his phone to avoid standing out like a statue. He wraps his scarf loosely around his
When we were kids, my sister kicked this boy.
I went looking for her. He went looking for her. She went looking for her. They went looking for her.
We all went looking for her.
I look.
You look.
He looks.
She looks.
They look.
We
Each year, the clouds lowered. Each year, the boys' hopes crept closer to their grasp.
Arranged in front of Papa were a cup of coffee, his glass eye, and a shot of whiskey. One by one, they would patch him up before he left for work. The sun hadn’t yet chinned the horizon, and we sat
sat on my couch for twenty-four hours popping oxycontin while I watched a full season of Gilmore Girls. Lorelai and Rory were not on speaking terms and I missed my mom.
One evening you come home to discover Boris Yeltsin standing in your kitchen.
Twelve hours later, I surrendered to sleep at a rest stop.
I return to the kitchen and walk in on Jodeci pulling a syringe out of her neck. She takes the rope from my hands and uses it as a tourniquet for my arm.
Psycho Trev scared the shit out of me. He did the dishes at a Tony’s diner in town. He lived in a singlewide out in the woods and did a lot of shrooms. He had huge parties at his place too.
“Hey buddy, are you alright?”
The husband looked at me with a smile disguising mild alarm.
“I’m going to be.”
The guy looks over and sees me eating my pepper steak. He is a hard blur of hair and grease. For one brief minute, I think he’s going to lasso me or ask me to come over and polish off a bag of pork rinds.
My husband is a proficient fighter. He catalogs the inconsistencies between the things I say and things I do. Against this tactic, I have no defense. For he is right, but what he fails to understand is the internal consistency in my inconsistency.
But I didn't feel sick anymore, was the thing. The sweating, capsizing sensation, the kaleidoscope of Muppets I saw square dancing behind my eyelids on that third night when it was legitimately bad, all that had been weeks ago and still everyone brought my mother food.
“Louis has stopped taking his dose.”
Sarah lowered herself to her knees in front of the fridge, continuing to uselessly rearrange the sanguinium.
“We think maybe you can spend some extra time with him, maybe get him to start taking it again,” Tim said. “You do great with Dotty.”
Is this new relationship self-sabotage in disguise, or is it the cure?
Garielle's longest, most peculiar, most particularized book. A sure-to-be collector's item. Not be be missed!