From the Archives: Pigeon Forge

Beatriz feels alarmingly soft in your hands, and you graze her body with your palms the way you would pet the long grass by the river where you live. She tosses her dark hair aside, wraps her hand over yours, and clenches down on her own flesh.



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White flowers in a tree superimposed over top the face of a person.

Lilacs

I had a plan. I would chance upon a mountain spring. Glacial. Immaculate.


A green rice paddy extends into the horizon

Grown Up Girls

Where can a girl go, but to a husband’s home? Somewhere in cities, impractical idiots dream of a revolution—our own land, our own country—but here in the village, there are only mountains and marriage.


A spray of pink bougainvillea with a few green leaves interspersed splashes across a gray, backlit sky

The Reader

“I can’t believe you would write about something like that,” my sister said. She had called our house, it was pure luck that my mother happened to be out.


A plate of meatballs sit on a white lace tablecloth with a ray of sun hitting them.

Foreigner

I had to get used to this, the hunger, or it would eat me from inside out.


Where the Blue Rests

Blue in action was a matter of life or death, and you avoided it at all costs, not jump into it like Chikara unless you wanted to die.


Two fireworks mid-explosion in the night sky

Ana

she was the first boy I had ever kissed and I wanted to be kissing a boy but I wanted so badly to be a girl while doing it