All Stories

I. The chief priests chanted hymns over the bonfire’s raging flames that first night in Izuland. Their voices were unnaturally high-pitched, a shrill tone I feared would tear the cords of their voice boxes out of their throats. They threw herbs into the fire, discoloring the flames into a cold green conflagration that screeched in […]

The taxi pulls away from the curb with a wheeze of exhaust, lifting the edge of my cape and rousing a lone, unraked leaf from its slumber on the yellowing lawn. Down the street, a child laughs, her bicycle weaving down smooth asphalt flanked by identical red brick facades. She is too far away to […]

After the first lost girl reappeared, sleeping like some fallen angel in a drainage ditch on the edge of the woods, Homily returned to her fossils. The lost girls were shells pushed deep into the ground, left to harden into stone, and then pried out again by fault lines and fingers and the nets of […]

Chapter 1 Lane explained that we weren’t allowed real names only after she hired me. “You’ll be ‘Foxtrot,’ she declared. She convinced me that my new name fit perfectly. I couldn’t be ‘Bravo’ or ‘Charlie,’ because both of them were still alive, but she couldn’t legally say where or when. ‘Zulu’ seemed insensitive, ‘November’ was […]

They’re coming for me, gaining ground with every stride. If they catch me, they’ll tear me apart just to see what’s inside. The path—if you can call it that—is uneven and dark. I strain my eyes against it out of habit, but there is no light here. I run faster, propelling myself deeper into the […]

We were one of the first to receive the baby doll. Our package arrived on a Saturday morning last September when Kamran and I had been living in our dream apartment in San Francisco’s Mission Bay for about a month. Just a year ago native grasses and weeds thrived in the sandy soil near an […]