n July of 1997, the female relatives of a 5-year-old girl from Delaware, Ohio took revenge on her molester by tying him up, clearing his ass of hair, covering the newly smooth skin with muscle salve and sodomizing him with a cucumber. The act inspired a documentary called The Cucumber Incident.
Read MoreIt took some three weeks for Monica Graf to stop calling me even after I'd gathered my self-respect and begged off the humiliating affair. Her late-night calls had taken on a reliable pattern—opening sweetly, then racing to a crescendo of abuse directed at me and the world in general. It was like listening to some profane “1812 Overture.”
Read MoreThe desert is brown. The buildings are brown. The formerly gray streets are brown with dust. The sky is blue.
My uniform is three shades of brown. The eight million Iraqis who live here are a multitude of browns. The backs of my formerly pink hands are burnt brown. The sky is massively and oppressively blue.
Read MoreThere are so many gorgeous photos of me. And I’m beautiful in every one of them; thin, perfect, frozen in time. And the drugs were lovely. They were like ice-skating with your best friend when you were eight, like falling in love, like living on cake. I was in New York for six years in a loft in the West Village when I first met Harry. Harry… that womanizing, shitty filmmaker of a man.
Read MoreI met him wearing a barely breathable gold-and-black sequined dress, 5 ½ inch heels, and reindeer antlers. It was my company’s holiday shit-show, hosted by a swanky lounge on the Lower East Side. High ceilings and a trendy DJ booth. Dimly lit with black velvet curtains.
Read MoreWhen people ask me about it I tell them my body’s at war with itself. My body is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict all bound up in blood cells. We have border control issues; half my insides misunderstand the other half, which means everybody is an enemy of somebody all inside me. Autoimmune is the wrong word. It's an identity crisis. A body politic problem.
Read MoreBefore I get to the tits, I need to set the scene a bit. I’ve been going to the same taco truck for about 6 months now every Monday. The truck is not much to look at: scattered veins of rust melting over faded graffiti.
Read MoreA dozen years ago, the doctors took my lung. I didn’t tell my girlfriend, Margot, until just the other day because I was sure she would break up with me. I still smoke (cigarettes and weed) and she hates these habits in general. Now she's worried the remaining lung will suffer the same fate, that if I don’t stop soon, “it’s just a matter of time.”
Read MoreWhat we were arguing about after Spencer’s funeral—Ramada Inn conference room, cold chicken finger buffet, carpet that felt like tree moss—was which part of the ceremony would have been Spencer’s favorite.
Read MoreI’ve always looked like a good little boy, but I’m not. I’m very bad, and because I’m still somewhat of a “kid” it makes doing what I want easier. Generally speaking, I usually only want to do bad things.
Read MoreWe had sex in the morning when we woke up. Most couples can’t do that, but we never had anywhere to be right away, and that’s how we started our days. If Patrick knew I started this by saying that, he would have laughed, I hope.
Read MoreVincent scraped the remnants of dinner into the trash and handed the dishes to Cheryl for washing. Alexa and Harry, their spouses, were on the porch with a deck of cards and the last of the gin between them.
Read MoreA broke hand is nothing new. At least it feels and looks broke. Wayne’s familiar with broke hands because he’d busted this one, the right one, before. One night at Leo’s pool hall, 22 years old, opening a beer bottle. He’d set that bottle cap against the metal rim of a corner pocket and whacked it hard.
Read MoreI sat at my colleague’s breakfast table recently, not exactly an amorous morning, awaking as we usually did on a Saturday to her awful snoring and agitated semi-slumbering feet.
Read MoreThey were tired from all of the sex. It was the weekend, which meant it was time for having sex and walking around their apartment without any clothes on. Every weekend worked that way. They would get home from work, take off their clothes, and have sex until they got tired.
Read MoreThis image and the ones to follow capture what is thought to be the first experiments in the “sky writing” by Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, in the air above Reservoir Park in the aforementioned city.
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