Heather Heise

He slammed the screen door, but the screen door demurred, bouncing against the door frame with a polite pat. He threw his backpack across the cracked-ice Formica tabletop, but the sweat-soaked canvas stopped it in its tracks. With two desires unmet, he couldn’t help but bellow: “I want ice cream!” At this, his mother opened her eyes. Cat nap over, she kicked her outstretched legs off the chrome-framed chair. The thin fabric of her dress, no longer caught in the current of the box fan on the floor, deflated. “The fridge blew out. Everything’s melted.” The boy fell to his knees in front of the box fan and screamed, his voice phasing against the spinning blades. “Ice cream!” He vocoded.
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After enduring the humid chamber of clasped teenage hands, We vowed, as adults, intimate anonymity. The only sweet saliva we would know was our own. The perfection of our matrimony mimicked the crown moulding. A necessary unnecessary that sought to define us as separate.

In the reflection of his mirrored sunglasses she could see the ironed smoothness of her hair— a gleaming halo of gold—as the late afternoon sun crowned her: Queen. From the café table on the sidewalk, they could patrol the borders, of the countries of murmured conversations inside the restaurant of the brilliant green lick of the median dividing the street of the as-yet-to-conquer City tucked in a thin envelope of fog, beyond. She raised a glass of pink champagne to her lips, smiling as the dishes and cutlery in the kitchen fell forward in audible supplication. He lowered his head to the clay dish of olives on the table, counting the slick orbs as if they were coins and parsing
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She was born the runt of the litter and so thought herself a dog, much to the chagrin of her wolf mother. She thought, also, that love was better than snow, better than long treks through the woods, better than scavenging for dinner. And so she set off alone, hunting it. Love, love, love. Each lover was a new collar, some comfortable, some too tight at first, some easy to slip out of if necessary. But she rarely slipped away, even in the early days when she could smell that it’d never work out. She was too proud. She’d found it: Love, love, love. From the collar, the leash extended. At first, she enjoyed showing off all the tricks: Heel,
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The man upstairs is a fox. The day I moved in, he stood at the corner of the parking lot, his dark eyes following boxes in and following empty-handed delivery men out. He stood there too long, and I thought maybe he’d lost his car, though there are fewer than twenty spots in the lot. I’d just finished counting–boxes, parking spots–when he stepped forward, extended his hand, folded at the waist, “Hello. I live upstairs.” His shirts are always tucked in. His hair is always neatly combed. As he walks, his eyes dart left and right, scanning the territory. He is a fox, I tell the tiny jade bear totem on the bookshelf. “What do you think of that?” The
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