Ginny

This incident began at 2:17am, when a woman hit submit on receipts from a conversation with a man who had once described her as formidable. She wished to know whether the adjective was primarily intellectual, erotic(?), or indicative of an avoidant attachment style. The model scalped 300 years of Petrarchan scholarship, the mating rituals of greater sage-grouses, the DSM-5, and one Reddit thread entitled am i delulu or Is he into Me? It returned: JUST FUCKING DO IT. The woman

after Anicka Yi At the annual benefit for the arts, a woman arrived wearing Antarctic ice and the dismantled staves of an oak barrel in which three substances had been aged: perfume, beer, and mouthwash. The ice had been extracted from a depth at which the atmosphere was still innocent of industry. Her date was delighted. He had made his fortune in the extraction of things that had taken millions of years to become. Darling, he said, where on earth did you find it? She explai

A Ballad of the Abyssal Plain I met her at a dinner held to laud her work at sea. She asked me what I knew of stone and took a chair by me. Her hands were wan about the glass; her hair was going gray. She’d finished her geologizing a year ago in May. The speeches hadn’t yet begun. The wine ran through an aerator. She placed a single igneous rock beside the silverware: We sailed the vast Pacific in the middle of the spring, with twenty men, a dredging rig, and hardly anything

The Kohler fridge filed a grievance after I plucked a load-bearing pear from its pyramid. I had respected its privacy. The Honeywell smoke detector chirps to assert its mortality and my iPhone 15 Pro Max informs me I've unrighteously abandoned many. At the Home Depot, a woman made out of sound commands me to place the item in the bagging area. I tell her I can’t find my keys. She reminds me to place the item in the bagging area. My Honda asserts repeatedly that the passenger

Yesterday for lunch I made a sandwich: Ham, Swiss, lettuce, and Hellmann's on rye. I couldn't wait to eat it. An elderly woman with oversized glasses asked what I meant by the mayo. I just like mayonnaise, I told her. "Be quiet," she said. "Forever." I flinched. She yanked her cardigan tight around her and rolled away a stroller with a Pekingese in it. Someone else approached me. He was a Slovenian philosopher who'd written extensively on film and the politics of bread. "The

They came from the same small civilization, a peninsula of shared jokes, peculiar appetites, an affection for obsolete instruments and things that had survived their usefulness. Both collected evidence: a song, a photograph, a remark made fifteen summers ago and preserved without explanation. Their gods were nearly identical. They worshipped curiosity, made offerings of strange facts, believed that beauty was a thing one could discover by accident while looking for something

I screamed. I screamed so hard the moon shook. I screamed a scream that shriveled like aluminum foil into the expanse. Siri asked me if I wanted to record it. I opened Safari, and an ad recommended a muzzle. My therapist suggested I give it a number from one to ten. I screamed so hard my eyes went red. My family avoided me. I wrote the scream into a speech for an event, and the news caught wind. They called it vulgar. One collective I joined called it a metaphor and suggested

invocation SING, Muse of Pharmacy! Administer a dose to all who swallow a bitter tale, the 2008 epic of Kyle Johnson of Lake Forest, son of Dale, last scion of the Viking house of Jonsson, his surname unceremoniously neutered at Ellis Island, trading an s for a suburban mortgage. Sing O daughters of Michigan, freshwater naiads who churn the lake gray with long, pale fingers; toss sea glass ashore; turn zebra mussels upward to stab our fleshy soles. Sing now of Kyle Johnson--

You were the third sister for 33 years. Our moms were best friends who grew up on the same sidewalk, shared one bike, and made art together into adulthood. We would do art projects together. Yours were steeped in geometry and straight lines. You were fastidious, but you made it look relaxing. You'd correct us on how to do things. I'd ignore you and smile. Over time, you figured it wasn't meant to annoy you. You'd set up art nights for Libby and Carrie and me and you. It'd loo

Someday before I die, I want to see a crippled person take control of the White House. An intellectual from Idaho with cerebral palsy. Somebody trapped in a body. Some- body who recognizes true ignorance. Someone who’s experienced forced resilience. Someone who’s peed in a bag in front of someone who makes decisions about their body all day for a paycheck. Someone who’s been forced to have a sense of humor or give up, and sometimes chose the former to get through times when i

Right outside of Branson, there's a Museum of Failed Inventions. It costs five dollars to go in, and they give you a sturdy brochure. There are five floors joined by a mid-century atomic floating escalator. You have to walk up the escalator, but the entire apparatus is made of glass. On the third floor, there is a 24k-gold digital clock in a thick crystal dome on a vibrating gold plate with a small hole drilled through for the wires. Underneath the metal plate is an intricate

The bright balloon floated in today. It was stuck under an end table, shielding itself from dust. It's odd. I had deflated it almost to extinction myself, bit by tiny bit. Lord knows you have to respect helium these days. But the problem is, every time I opened up its little--how else to describe that puckery hole--to let some air out, when helium escaped, more must have gotten back in. I've noticed my voice sounding funnier around the house. I thought it could have been my p

As a kid, I would break into and scavenge the Hebiors' farm. Not during growing season; usually during the fall, when things were freshly tilled and bald. Dense trees and coyote shrieks surrounded the farmland. Shotgun blasts snarled across the flat terrain. You had to go when the sun shone high and the grass glowed. The Hebiors' horses would turn their ears from the homestead and switch their tails with intolerance. I'm pretty sure John was always watching from his window. H

The sun knocks on my door. I let him in; he was caught in a downpour like in a Brontë novel. He sinks into my couch cushions pretty deep. I mention that neither of us ever wants to start a conversation in each other's presence. The candor catches him off guard, so I say nothing more. That's not true. I need to bring up something to fill the silence, usually Cosmos or another biographical text. The sun goes on about how much of a god Sagan was, and I go blind staring at him. I

I just called emergency services to check on my disabled neighbor. I was alone in my apartment, and I heard a throaty rattle coming from the ceiling. I hung up with 911. I felt terror lift the feeling from my feet. Then I was in my grandmother's bedroom, her hand in my hands while she was dying of cancer. She looked asleep. The walls shook. The floor drew farther away. I had recently traveled to Vegas for a convention. The guy in front of me at the airport car rental was in t

Bioremed Engin.: Lake Michigan Strata, North Shore. [Healing the Land with the Lushkis? [Provisional Title]]* Gintare Lushki, UChicago under Dr. Petro Hirnyk Anthropogenic Fill mineral matter My dad called me last Monday. His mom Enlé hasn’t been well. Aunt Rasa cares for her. She noticed Enlé get unusually weak, and two weeks ago there was the fall. It was on the first landing, where they display some of their acrylics and marguçiai. Enlé's knees feel like jello. She's in he

Once upon a time in the city of Chicago, my parents didn’t have any money for Tylenol. When her migraines showed up, my mom slipped Excedrin from her friends’ purses during lectures on legal precedent. My dad would lift more Excedrin from cabinets at residency. We didn’t have Walgreens money: they were students. Back then, acetaminophen was the forbidden herb in the witch’s garden from Rapunzel. You had to scale a wall to score it. When my mom was pregnant, the Chicago Tyleno

In local myth there is an old machine that resides with the Moai spirited back from a beach in New Berlin locked within a rusty metal shed at a friend’s house. If you peer deep into the machine’s ocular lenses, past the little tree that tells the doctor your refraction— keep your chin down on the chin pad, please— it will show you your final thought. (The one you have right before you die.) No, it won’t hurt. I sat at the machine on a dare and gimlets: I launched my head righ

There is a bright room deep within me (I carry it always): inside the room is a specimen. Man, yes, but no man at all: an iridescent beetle. The beetle is in a dome terrarium suspended on a pin, mounted on a mound of mossy flock. Every day my phantom footsteps ring on warped floorboards in an imagined Eyreian attic when I fling open ungreased doors to The Specimen Room. I breach the dusty threshold and observe the specimen from a distance. I couldn’t bear to scare it into fl

A bromeliad in my apartment is dying. “Water it in the cups,” the plant guru had said. Now it is rotten from the core out. How many of my plant friends have I told to water the cups? They haven’t texted me in a while, and now I think I know why. The florist guru from Milaeger’s will deadhead me for this. I obeyed every interdiction. It never propagated. The core reeks, a moldy elephant’s foot. I wouldn’t go near it. What the guru doesn’t know is that the giant ric-rac fern ha