That’s them, said Gabriel, and he turned about in his chair and looked back at the blue kiosk. Gabriel was squinting and holding one knee up in his arms. The negritas, he said.
The tired Queenslander where my mother lived, and in which I had grown up (with, and then without, a father) was too big for her now and she had students and migrants living in the rooms.
The guys in the office laughed when you were assigned this one. You’ll know them by their scabbed knuckles, they said, by their clawed right hands cradled always at chest level like twitching beach-rescued starfish.
We know they must smell like the dustbins behind a seafood restaurant, although we can’t smell them from here. They look as cold and alien to the touch as the part of your leg that finds its way out from under the bedclothes in winter.
He likes this new work: granting, recurrently, the single recurring prayer of the drunk; the way the sallow light drags ruby through the bottom of a pint of stout.
Day 1. Using a series of hops, clicks, and honks, the penguins have communicated their desire to be free.
It starts in a mid-sized former mining town in Yorkshire. No explanation for it. No marks on the bodies. No history of such things.
One night, Alphabet fell from the sky. It began with uppercase Y’s spinning earthwards past our bedroom windows like giant maple seeds.
He wakes to an echoing quack. In the bathroom mirror, behind his shoulder, a duck roosts on the shower rail. When he turns around, it’s not there.
Saturday is abortion day at Happy Bellies: Potbelly Pig Rescue and Sanctuary. I used to be upset by this, the idea of all those potential somethings becoming nothings, but a lot of things that used to upset me don’t upset me anymore.