Nassau Weekly

Fiction

  • I Let Myself Fall

    I Let Myself Fall

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    “They will dig at our bones as we did the dinosaurs’. And when they find yours and my bones twisted up in each other, they will create a great creature out of us.”

  • Cherry

    Cherry

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    “Without telling her mother, Antonia bought her first Summer Fridays after a tanless summer spent marinating in a boardwalk pizza shop with dough-crusted fingernails and a horrendous lime green apron, getting tipped in pennies and the occasional seashell.”

  • Chats

    Chats

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    “Suppose Father had gone to heaven. Wasn’t he born there, then, again? Every birth, thus, was a death. A death from nothingness.”

  • One Last Kiwi Summer

    One Last Kiwi Summer

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    “Today I am a disposable torso, a hipbone, a back: drained of your attraction.”

  • Things I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You

    Things I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You

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    in

    When I was five, I stole five dollars from your bedside table, but I felt too guilty to spend it. When we went through the house, I took your favorite wallet and put the five dollars in it. I went to the bank to get pennies because you always had pennies in your wallet. Having…

  • A Good Night’s Sleep

    A Good Night’s Sleep

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    “The man wandering through Chinatown called his pregnant wife and told her he’d found a new tenant for the second floor of their brownstone. The tenant’s name was Mary.”

  • Web of Memory

    Web of Memory

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    “The words rest between us, I hope, like a rope of reconciliation. She never takes hold, however. The line severs.”

  • A Bad Habit

    A Bad Habit

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    “She turned her head and looked up at the thin cracks in the ceiling. Her eyes traced the ruptures above them and Lizzie wondered what it might make it collapse. He turned his head and grabbed her face so her eyes would meet his, touched his nose to hers.”

  • Initiation Spins

    Initiation Spins

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    “Some guy I must’ve known threw his hand over the glass to block me. He mouthed something I couldn’t hear, as if we were underwater, and tapped his finger on the side of the glass. Someone’s phone flashlight blinded me as it attempted to illuminate what was in it. Someone screeched.”

  • Allen’s New Kettle

    Allen’s New Kettle

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    “For a moment, Allen just stared at the kettle. The room felt smaller, like the air had thickened. He thought of Ryan, of work, of losing the job, and the apartment, and everything else, and then looked back at the kettle’s bright little screen, now a meadow in the wind, calm, and endless.”

  • Liquidation

    Liquidation

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    “That could be anyone, I think. The beach, the cliffs, the moon, just something with a voice that sounds like Margaret. The ocean could have picked up her accent and dissolved it, carried what I know as Margaret—black hair, sports bra, raspy voice—and released its latent sound into the cold wind, back to me. A…

  • When blood is nipped and ways be foul

    When blood is nipped and ways be foul

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    “She stood there, shuddering in place. She shook from the cold, from the fear, from the pain. She shook for what she had lost — something she knew could not be put back. For she now understood that Fear was not something lodged in her chest like shrapnel, but rather something that was taken away.”