“Susmaryosep.” Eyes shut, old housekeeper pours the solution over me: Lagundi, bayabas, sambong. Riotous scent heady in roiling water. Maligno, spare your erring daughter. Diwata, relent. Aba Ginoong Maria, look down on me lying in bed, nursing fever, frame unmoving. Soleil David was born
Ralph knew that it wouldn’t last, but he liked how her hair hung blonde to her waist, the bones of her face, all the curves of her. They came together in spouts, at the end of the day, after long talks on the phone about
The woman I love comes back from the war with part of her face blown off and a surgery scheduled for Tuesday. I get drunk in a hotel room down the street from where she’ll be medevaced tomorrow, then type the words face and reconstructive
On average, the adult human skeleton is composed of 206 bones weighing 30-40 % of the body’s total weight. Water accounts for half that figure. Desiccated, then, the skeleton weighs 15-20% of a body’s original weight at death. So if my father weighed 170
It begins with something sharp, a smell forced up my nose and down my throat. A vision flashes, just a snap of memory, so vivid I feel its edges: I am back in St. Louis, running my pre-adolescent fingers through freshly cut grass; in Mesa,
I understood—instinctively, if not denotatively—the word ethereal before I stumbled across its definition during junior-year SAT prep. Ethereal: extremely delicate and light in a way that seems too perfect for this world. Ethereal: it’s the silver ribbon of sound that threads the air when Elise