Photo by Vitaliy Shevchenko on Unsplash by Brett Pribble At night, Jesus visits my bedroom, not a Middle Eastern Jesus speaking a foreign language, a white Jesus speaking perfect English. He apolog...

We come to the bend in the river that I promised would look like an alien landscape and you say it looks more like the bones of a massive dinosaur, being slowly revealed by the eroding earth....

The change began subtly. At first, I noticed a strange stiffness in my joints, like the heavy, creaking doors of an old house. The mirror reflected my once-flowing cascade of dark curls, merging into...

They’d exchanged many pretend-smile hellos, you-again waves, don’t-like-you-much nods every time they’d come across each other in the past. But when they met at the funeral, Anna was not pleased as...

My mother is addicted to true crime. It can’t be fiction, she says, it must be true. She devours these tales late into the night, listens to podcasts while she’s driving, shopping, cooking. Why? We...

Whittled thin by another season of flu and fire, Jacob looked to the internet and embraced its advice: Be more raccoon. Donning a domino mask scavenged from brighter times and an old cosplay costume,...

I was twenty-two, alone at my parents’ Orlando winter home, roughing it without any of our staff. My father had made it known I was not to get too comfortable, saying, Life offered no handouts. A...

That ghost girl is back, boxing me awake with her old leather gloves. I smell them just before the punch comes. I inhale their sweet earthiness and think, oh no, but never manage to wake fast enough...

He wears a wolf mask, and that’s okay. I’m fairly forgiving. I find him standing in full sun on a patch of grass across from our hotel, watching the city unroll itself. He left our room that morning...

We only grow flowers and trees and joy and all things beautiful and shiny. We open the windows, and air the room, and we chase all wrong and bad and evil out, but Mom asks for the truth because she’s...

I can’t say I’m all that surprised I ended up in Hell after I died, but things are really starting to look up. I admit that I had to fight through some pretty formidable foes with nothing more than a...

The man returned to town. He shouldered his bag and stepped out of the station and past the shuttered hotel, towards the big house on the side street. Then for a time he stood in the rain, in the...

First, I forgot how to play. When there is so much shouting I have to think like an equal at home. There’s Mom in the bedroom sleeping and a recovering dog on the couch and I forget in the morning...

When Sam entered the restaurant, Julie’s keen eyes flashed, then just as swiftly dulled. She firmed her lips and turned back toward me: “When did you say you’d go to Paris?” Her pale cheeks flushed a...

You are an eight-foot painting in a gallery in Mallorca. Your stomach is swollen with creatures inside. Animals with gnashing teeth and eyes big like Muppets. Something you’d see under the microsco...

My only friend, Little Hansel, smells like closet. That’s what my mother said the one time she met the four-year-old. I was babysitting him for my weed dealers, a pair of comfy old dykes. My mother...

How we all wanted it to come in our sleep, if we had a choice, and since we were allowed, in this group setting, to talk freely about our desires, though we were sure that some of us, Gregory and...

To the zebra who wanders loose in our suburban neighborhood. It ambles up and down the streets like he belongs among their English countryside names. He’s not intimidated by Northumberland or...

There’s a hurricane teasing the leftover bits of Massachusetts. A snow storm masking Chicago. Mission control wants to keep things concrete. Be specific they say, since this is the final call. “Are...

Though really, in this dream, it’s more a saloon than a bar, with swinging doors that slap the walls. I’m behind the bar, so I assume I’m the bartender. We’re all in old-timey clothes. I’m wearing a...