The Submersible aQuatic Cetacean Communication Robot—professionally known as SQCCR, affectionately known as “Squawker”—splashes into the harbor from the starboard side of the Charlotte’s Web at dawn. A few brilliant, cool drops hit Julia’s skin.

The heat index is already 96 and aiming for the red by ten. What must the dolphins think of the extra three degrees the world’s gained since the oldest members of their pods were born?

Maybe this is the upgrade that will finally help her find out...

5000 words

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The iron below you was born in the center of a star your people named Coatlicue, long after she was gone. You might say the iron killed her, or she died to make the iron. Or you might describe the subatomic particles and how they fused, because you are a scientist, and you know how metaphors can lie.

Coatlicue was the mother of our sun, and of yours, too, and of all the worlds woven from the dust between.

You see, in a way, we are twins.

3500 words

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Three or four times a week, I walk by the chain link cage on Mission Street—the other part of Mission Street—in front of the gray, spiked wall of the PG&E substation, often on my way to Street Taco on 9th. I always wonder what it holds behind its diamond wires, sections bolted to the sidewalk at haphazard angles to each other, trapping in five Brisbane box trees...

1200 words

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So we sit around our fire in that same silence, staring into the rapid oxidation of alien wood, waiting for the coals to die. The giant centipedes are chittering between the horse-sized mushrooms that surround us. I can hear their chitin crunching through the detritus…

7000 words

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Pushcart Nominee

Someone left cat food in the extremely haunted basement trash room of my building and it made me so hungry I forgot how creeped out I was being down there for a second. So I hit up a photographer I modeled for a couple times to see if he had work for me, and he did. I’m meeting him at the American Hotel, on the bleeding edge of the Tenderloin, about eight blocks from my apartment, with mascara on.

3400 words

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I remember decades ago when this used to be 580, perching my plastic tuatara Korra on the edge of the backseat window, peering past the traffic with her at the sparkling bay. In high school, it was earsplitting demolition, then bare dirt my first year of college. I don’t know what brought me down here after I dropped out, maybe I was drawn to the vacant land because that’s what I felt like, empty and waiting for something new. Even stepping on the field with my own feet, touching its contaminated soil as I planted those first seeds with Marco’s crew, the place itself meant nothing—until you showed up in your dad’s red Ford Prakasha three days into planting...

4000 words

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Fifteen years. I count them by converting Standard to Gregorian badly while my feet move forward without me. It’s been fifteen years since I’ve seen another human and here’s one at the Stones on Ferocina underneath the glowing rings and stars, swirling a red gourd-bottle while he stares into the bonfire like a human would, like any human would, with the flames flickering across his brown and bearded face. He looks up and he sees me and that must be the same expression that I had a moment earlier: is that a human? No way…

1000 words

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Arthur Corey owns a small house in Port Charlotte, Florida. It’s bright lemon yellow, with a lawn he’s trying to kill, and a carport with no car, where a glass table gathers bong ash in the shade of seagrapes...

700 words

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