Of course every time I attempt to explain the nature of my house arrest to myself, I inevitably allow for great expanses of opinion, mostly my opinion, which should not be regarded as in any way legal—despite my superior mental firepower I am no expert of the laws prohibiting the Alleged Transgression. Which is in large part why I am here. This room is nice on most days.
Read MoreEach day the black eye was duller. I thought it was clouds but with the next sun the globe was more gray, as if dusted with sand, staring past me toward the sky. On the third morning as I went my path the bees parted her lashes to drink from the eye, as if to sting her back to sight.
Read MoreSoon as I get home from my shift at Marketplace Solutions, Ryan’s all over me about the MOOC. He refuses to go ahead on his own because the MOOC is something he wants to do as a team on account of eventually we want to be business partners, so his thinking is that by taking the course together we’re not only learning Entrepreneurship 101 or whatever, we’re also learning about each other…
Read MoreMegan Jeffries moved past the smokers and angled her body away as if they reached for her hands. When offered help, she shook her head no thank you. Using the left side of her body, she shoulder-pushed through the revolving door, clutching the cupcakes to her chest, and rode the elevator to the ninth floor. Her sweating only got worse in the air conditioning.
Read MoreI was eight when my parents started leaving me home alone. As a CPA, my father handled the financial operations for the municipality of Hialeah Gardens. He and my mother often went to dinner parties with the chief of police, his lackeys, the mayor, and his lackeys.
Read MoreShe has a harelip and we only have hate sex.
It’s winter and everything is desperate. We sit on the side porch and listen to a fisher cat tear into a fox pup.
Read MoreIt took ten squirts of Love’s Baby Soft on each wrist to make the scent last all day, but all 25 plaid-skirted girls in my homeroom had been seduced by the same ads, the ones that showed a girl caressing a horse’s muzzle or lounging in a field of flowers, sucking a lollipop.
Read MoreThe train is crowded today, everyone takes up twice as much room as usual in their floor-length trenches and barrel-busted down-filled parkas, plaid scarves glistening with bright beads that have already forgotten their crystalized earthward hurtle.
Read MoreI had just spent the last six months unemployed, sitting on my couch in my eighty-degree Seattle apartment, hammering away at my Netflix queue. I rarely went out for drinks or dinner in an effort to conserve cash. My government check was enough to cover my rent and bills with a little left over to stock up on Kraft Dinner and ramen noodles.
Read MoreMy old lady, my baby-baby comes home and tosses my ass out of bed. What I mean is my baby hoists the mattress up like a human forklift (she’s got some killer thighs, man) until—me, already on the edge—I go a tumbling to the carpet.
Read Moren 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.
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