It 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.
Read MoreMy apartment smells like dead squirrel.
There's a tree outside my kitchen window where an old gray squirrel used to live. He would climb out on the low branches and watch me eating breakfast every morning.
Read MoreI began building tree houses soon after being fired from the fire department for being videotaped smoking at a gas station in front of the pump, repeatedly. The late local news did one of those gotcha stories on me and then their competitors did some follow-ups and before long, there was a petition with six thousand signatures calling for my dismissal.
Read MoreEugene shifted the flatbed Chevy into third and crawled up Sawmill Ridge. He turned Robert Earl Keen up a notch and surveyed both shoulders of the road. The dispatcher, Deidra, had said the accident was just over the hill, and that the roadkill wasn’t pretty, or so she had heard. She said the victim and the police were at the scene.
Read MoreThere was only one stick left in the matchbox. The hands were unsteady; so were the fingers. Yet, with the utmost care that could be summoned, it was lighted by the limping fingers. The flicker, shielded from sea breeze by cupped palms, was lifted up and up until it made contact with the tip of the pipe clenched to the mouth.
Read MoreCement steps banged into metal railings as Robert Riley and I climbed to my second floor apartment. The key, newly cut, fit awkwardly in the lock. When I opened the door, I was confronted by the sudden smell of newly shampooed carpet and mildew, and dust motes floated in sunbeams that penetrated the single dirty window.
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