Month: August 2022

“Mom, look!” I point so fast my hand smacks the scented pine tree hanging from her rearview mirror. It’s been there so long I don’t think it has any smell left, but whatever. “What?” She doesn’t look up. She’s on Bumble, which is just weird. I mean, I get it, Dad’s been gone a long…

It wasn’t the amoeba’s fault. The amoeba in question was, in the beginning anyway, an ordinary specimen of Naegleria fowleri—Nigel for short, because Nigel is way less of a mouthful—floating about in warm water and eating bacteria when Sarita came splashing by on her morning swim in Rainbow Lake, which is not in fact made…

Iron Mark was pissed. The rental’s navigation screen was fritzed, there was no cell signal, and the shitty two-lane roads weren’t going where the map said they should. Typical California bullshit. On top of that, Iron Mark really needed to take a leak. The buffalo burger he’d ordered for lunch had been overcooked by an…

It’s funny what you get used to living in Alaska. Take bald eagles, for instance. When somebody from the Lower 48 comes to visit, they about wet their pants every time they see a baldie. The first time my friend Arbolina — that’s not her real name, she’d shoot me if I used her real name — saw one,…

He’d had a name once, but nobody ever used it, so by the time he left the rose bush and the field behind, he no longer knew it. He’d been born alone, the only singleton in the colony’s memory. Some said he was cursed, and even those that didn’t go that far grew uncomfortable in…