With their ski masks on,
they entered our house
and drank from our water glass
and sat on our rockers
and switched on our television
and wolfed down the leftovers in our fridge.
They stayed for two months,
unable to decide what to steal.
“Burglars” is originally published in Meditations of a Beast (2016). Reprinted with permission from Cornerstone Press.
Read a review of Meditations of a Beast here.
© Copyright 2020 Kristine Ong Muslim
Kristine Ong Muslim is the author of nine books, including the short fiction collections Age of Blight (Unnamed Press, 2016), Butterfly Dream (Snuggly Books, 2016), and The Drone Outside (Eibonvale Press, 2017), as well as the poetry collections Lifeboat (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2015), Meditations of a Beast (Cornerstone Press, 2016), and Black Arcadia (University of the Philippines Press, 2017). She is co-editor of two anthologies—the British Fantasy Award-winning People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction and Sigwa: Climate Fiction Anthology from the Philippines, an illustrated volume forthcoming from the Polytechnic University of the Philippines Press. Widely anthologized, her short stories have appeared in Conjunctions, Dazed Digital, Tin House, and World Literature Today. She grew up and continues to live in a rural town in southern Philippines.