flash
2026
My rewards for murdering Mère Supérieure were her wristwatch and a trip to Villefranche-sur-Mer. I find beauty in the watch with every little detail: its thin slices of steel for hands; its cool, clear face; even the nicks in its chain and specks of my own blood that hint at the previous owner’s violent disposition.
I’m so sorry can I just say something to you? Can you please come outside? I want to see this movie with you because it’s like a “real” movie you know, like wolf of wall street. Just called to say that I’m in a lot of stomach pain.
Barney, we were going to call him. It’s a family name, Amy’s dad’s middle name, after her great-great-granddad Barnaby.
The crows tell me they’re time travelers, and if true, they’re opaque in their relations, taking flight into the long tomorrow and the long yesterday, and I find three of them…
The new guy who thinks he can stack canned tomatoes better than anyone is here again. I thought he’d last maybe two weeks.
After the surgery, Grandfather has a new heart.
According to hospital records, the guy who had it first was twenty-two, studied environmental science, and died in a motorcycle accident.
2025
We did not mean for this to happen. The boy, bleeding on Marie’s carpet. Marie standing on his chest, tap dancing, as if that will help the situation.
Today we see the statue of David. His cock is unimpressive but his hands stop my breath. My best friend Amy wants me to sweet talk a museum attendant into letting us touch them.
Any absence maps the contours of a presence. Like the space between the shards of a chrysalis, shattered by the wild thing inside, or between the lines of a poem that contains the possibility of its own infinite unfolding, which is to say: any text at all.
In the morning, she biked up the path by the slough. At the station, she started the coffee. A moose stood grazing in the back yard, unbothered. She checked the AP wire, the police blotter.
His name was Joe-Thomas, I don’t remember his little brothers’ names. He was our age. He lit matches and threw them to his feet.
I’m alive, but I’m in Asheville. A man at the bus stop asks me why I’m wearing an ankle monitor. He asks why there’s a piece of beef jerky wedged between it and my skin.
The seedlings first started growing from your nipples. You never knew that could even happen. Can I just pluck them out? you asked me, but they were too deeply rooted in your breasts, straight into your rib cage.
My internship with Death was unpaid, but sometimes it’s just about the experience. You can’t be afraid to get your hands dirty. Someone on LinkedIn told me that. At least I got a nice recommendation letter out of it.
They scooped off the wrong tit. Then they scooped off the right tit, which was the really wrong one, lumpy as a fist.
Ted and Katie sit as far away from you and Amir as they can on the sectional. Ted looks uneasily at the baby on your lap. He’s like, is it gonna…? You smile and hold the baby out. Of course not, you reassure him. It’s just a baby. Here, try holding it. They cringe away. Fuck no, goes Ted.
2024
Sometime before Christmas the mothers made a deal. No more sugar, the mothers said. No more pudding no more lemon cake no more chewing gum no more Coca Cola no more ice cream no more Fruit-by-the-Foot no more raised-glazed no more Pop Tarts no more maple syrup no more Captain Crunch.
Here is a fact: at sixteen, I watched my father take our pictures off the walls and clothes from their drawers as he packed up my brother and sister and took them away from our home in Jamaica.
That time my dad took me camping by the Eel River at the Fortuna KOA. As we lay under the stars with the fire dying, he told me people eat spiders in their sleep—hundreds in a lifetime.
Minutes after my feet touched moon dust, your voice creaked in the video message.
“The virus wins,” you chuckled in that half-slanted way you did when nothing was funny. Jaundice yellow laced its way across your cheeks.
After the weather turned, so did we. For many, the end of fog led to the end of patience. Though we’d heard the cool grey city might become sun-bleached as Seville by the end of the century, someday had arrived sooner than anyone predicted.
It’s very late, the policeman insists, for a woman and a girl. His flashlight drills into our car.
Previous Sightings:
12 July 2022, Miracle Beach
Hugo Garcia went to Miracle Beach early in the morning. He wanted to beat the crowds. As he
bent to examine a dead crab, he heard a splash
You do not carry the dead through the front door of a house. Or else, more bodies will follow. So the bricklayers are here, sitting on the raised flower beds my mother painstakingly tends every morning.
June, always rain. Always ants after it rains. Always beetles smacking against the window and stink bugs polluting the air no matter the weather.
The house is yellow but used to be green. You can see the remnants of green when you walk up the porch steps and put your key in the lock, but of course you don’t need a key because you never lock it, none of you do,
2023
The day Yumi got her eighth piercing—a semicolon on her left eyebrow—her mother pulled her into the kitchen and gave her an ultimatum.
He used to see his daughter, Maya, each Saturday. Her mother would drive her to his condo early in the morning, and he would have to be awake because the doorbell never woke him.
Here is the father and here is the son and here is the midnight emergency room. If there was a mother she would be here too, but there is no mother, not anymore, just the father with the liminal-spacy eyes and the boy with the fluorescent mouth, a fractured glowstick dangling on a string around his neck.
Two giant men came in and asked for quarts of strawberry. My hands were split from constant washing, from the soaped rag I used to wipe down counters. I opened the freezer.
My heart is the small brown rabbit. We can recognize it from the other rabbits by the way it shivers, which I imagine is an indication of my anxiety. The hutch is large and made entirely of glass. The rabbits hop back and forth. They stare, unblinking.
Carrie has your left breast clenched in her hands. You want to ask her to be gentler, but how much more vulnerable can she expect you to be?
to sanctify our spaghetti with this many ungodly packets of sugar, dressing our noodles in a wet bed of banana ketchup, Eden cheese, and hot dog chunks that we watch you slurp in the backseat at 6am, because breakfast is God, and you will never have a meal so generous.
Bernadette’s husband stands over a mound of dark, wet dirt. In one hand, a trowel, in the other, a weathered copy of Gardening West of the Cascades they had found at the bins last winter. It’s bloated with water, the plastic edge of the cover curling away from the paper backing.
When we first started cohabitating, all our spinach would wilt. We both would buy separate bags on our separate Sunday supermarket runs. By month three, we made shopping a shared activity.
I grew up in Vermont, but now I live in California, and I only ever return home to visit my mom. A red blood cell pumped back to the heart. Each time I return, her house shrinks.
2022
There are things that only people who really love you will tell you. Like, quiet as it’s kept, most of your headspace will be taken up by a seventh-grade field trip, one in mid-May to Water Mania, where all the young ladies will have to wear the same red swimsuit, but only yours will be the one with very pubescent pubic hair seeping out the sides, spirals pushing against the spandex.
The Mandarin in Aunty Li’s new American neighborhood came in a disordered mélange of dialects. Though she’d learned to find comfort in it, she hadn’t heard a quick tongue carry her childhood town’s flavor of northern China in a while.
I liked the cover because there was a sexy man on it and I’m easy to manipulate, so I brought it to the register and paid a dollar. In the sun, I opened the book and found an inscription: To Russel, with Love. John.
Erin says I’m supposed to find us a house that looks like the one we’re already in: a Dutch Colonial with arched doorways, a staircase wider at the bottom than the top, and a too-small kitchen. She wants a fresh start in a familiar place.
In the years I lived in that neighborhood, when I was twenty-seven and later twenty-eight, I visited the goldfish daily.
My father once asked me, “Do you think white people know that fish have bones?” We were standing in the kitchen, watching the fish steam. Our hands were still scallion-y from the prep, but we wanted to see the glass lid turn cloudy.
Some rogue cigarette flew into my eye. It was my second time ever in New York City. The ember sizzled. It was July. I screamed. Mia rushed to find a bathroom. We fled South Street Seaport and zigzagged the city’s shimmering expanse.
he
shaves his head / goes on T / grows a beard / drops an octave / hardens up / slims down / strips down to his jeans, skinny jeans, to no effect, or none that he can tell, anyway, on the Object of His Admiration.
You might find this hard to believe, but as a kid I could talk to animals. They would seek me out and then ask me to speak on their behalf. It turns out animals have a ton of grievances. The squirrels were always going on about the parks department and their constant tree removal.
The woman on the line is explaining how to call Angels, not like on the phone, but how to manifest one, right where you are, right now. I am trying to remember this woman’s name, because I know her, and pretty well too.
Your heart, a simulation within a simulation within a simulation. Your hands unpacking shopping bags as they’re meant to. The tablecloth always plastic, always stained, always waiting. The sigh you breathe before you begin.
2021
The leaves fell late that autumn, and Sheila and Harold fought over who would have to rake.
A mixed-race man has just learned that his mother is cancer free. She couldn’t say more because she was tired, and the reception is bad where he’s at, a cabin in the forest, Northern California.
Somebody’s been stealing Mom’s bike. Her wheels, she likes to call it. The first time she left it on the side deck, which is visible from the street. Unfortunate, but preventable, I thought.
Our tap water usually tastes like hedgehog, except in the spring when it tastes like snake. Today our neighbor’s Jack Russell jumps into the well, so it tastes like wet dog.
I was in my twenties, wandering through downtown Philly in a tight skirt and tall boots. I had a baggie in my sock. The guy at the door didn’t check my purse after all. Just glanced at my ID and waved me inside.
There aren’t flowers in Darnell’s yard, just big rocks. He unlocks the door and says, “Take off your shoes.” I do as I’m told.
I’m wearing Vans. White Girl Shoes.
They tend to his body first. They are gagging but try to hide it out of respect for the astronaut’s feelings. They clean him, they comfort him, and they bring him back down into the embrace of gravity.
I went home to Levittown, and there I found my best friend waiting for me, no older than when I left her twenty years ago. I said, Wow, you look the same as the day I left you. No. No. No, she said. You!
You only saw the half of it. You can only see so much in that white baptism of light. You, centered in the theater. Te audience: rows of heads, knuckles in the dark.
There’s a window on the kitchen door that opens into Mother’s soul.
Sundays in Lahore are a lazy business. I roll out of bed by 1 pm; the heat has already baked my exposed skin. The cup of tea and a piece of fried naan, both warmed perfectly, are already on my table.
Arik at the Jerusalem Print Workshop shows us something the cost of this month’s mortgage payment. The cost of painting the walls in the two girls’ bedrooms and the accent walls in the kitchen and on the staircase.
2020
Grandma is usually quiet. She forgets names, dates, places, but she has moments of lucidity. She says she’s become a bird.
i am not always small, somebody’s little sister, somebody’s baby girl born with pneumonia. i guess that makes me a miracle & on god’s green earth how can any miracle be small?
They give Darrell Grayson the option of Yellow Mama or lethal injection. There is no real fairness in this decision. In not being strung up in a Michael Donald sort of manner.
I was afraid of cockroaches until I looked at one underneath my microscope. Dialing the lens, my sight spun in and out of focus over a rough, brown landscape.
Gloria Gao was the first girl I ever hurt. I punched her in the face for calling my family a bunch of dirty mainlanders. I was Taiwanese like her too, but just half, on my mother’s side, which meant the other half of my family must be made up of organ sellers, gutter spitters, and
The mama mammoth is always there, knee-deep in tar, sinking. Her partner and child wait on the shore. They’re still waiting.
My colleague and I are drinking beer in a strange town, which confuses him. There are too many consonants, and the gargoyles look odd. The conference we’re attending is inter-disciplinary, and this sets him on edge.
My grandmother moves mannequins out of the way to get to the refrigerator. It’s a small fridge meant to store kimchi, hidden from customers’ eyes because she covers it with a plaid shawl.
Michael’s dad died, so we went off to smoke by the BART tracks. Everything meant more when we were stoned, every leaf, every rock, every half-assed piece of graffiti work.
He found sex disgusting, and I found sex terrifying, and in that way we reached an understanding.
March 27th , 1981
I twist the curly wire connecting the rotary phone’s receiver to base. My first call to India from nine
thousand miles away.
The first time a guy said I look like a man was at the Jamba Juice stand in the mall. He was still a boy, probably my age and sticky from adolescence. You look like a man. He said it as if he had the right to say anything to me.
2019
It’s a sticky July Monday in 1972 when Norma Jean Negri hears about the elephant from a traveling circus who’d just been struck by lightning and died. The elephant’s name had been Norma Jean too.
March 27th, 2017 (AKA Night One)
Mr. Chuze calls it a science project but we know there’s more Art to it than Science. He wants us to create a poster showing how genes pass on phenotypic traits, to make it bright & colorful & ready for mass consumption.
In the darkening days of fall, Tiffany listens to the Isley Brothers on repeat, not a rhythm but a mood. She sits waiting in her Harlem classroom, where soon twenty sets of ten little fingers will grip her shoulders.
Content warning: sexual violence
(A Collaboration with Predictive Text)
manguitos
puerto rico’s the land of my grandfather. whenever he talks about his childhood, the island treasures into golden sunsets & moons, into pandulce plazas & beaches where women who eat the sun walk around. no other place, he says, bleeds & blooms the sun.
In sixth grade, D spent all of one recess asking me to say dirty words, because she liked the sound of dirty words but didn’t want to go to hell for saying them.
He takes a sick day. He isn’t feeling well, he explains to his wife in a text. You’re sick? she responds. He looks at the words on his phone. He keys an emoji, a shrug. I feel untogether, he writes.
We meet at a restaurant with dusty wine bottles from places we still cannot pronounce stacked high up the walls. A carafe of pinot grigio between us. We grown now.
Elizabeth White is white like her name. First time in our Bengali-medium, central-Calcutta school American woman is teaching. She is volunteer only. Come here, teach English one month and go. They’re trying many-many things for making students speak English. Posters here-there in the corridor: No English, No Future.
Just before the worst blizzard since ’86, knowing full well it was coming, I walked to South Station and took the Number Four bus two hours through the pre-blizzard traffic to the address Pete had given me…
2018
Your friend tells you over the phone. She wants you to know what you are facing. You take the knowledge from her calmly, like accepting a small white box. The weight of knowing balances in your hands.
The preacher in his black suit leans over my grandmother in her hospital bed and prays. He wrings his hands and asks for healing mercies and Thy will be done and intervention in a low but high-pitched whisper.
In the white-walled room there was an exhibit of photos of people being suffocated, and visitors wandered in and stared at them. Some people regretted coming and wanted to leave after a minute.
There’s a sad werewolf on my balcony. He broke up with his werewolf boyfriend—Gregov, an awkwardly lanky wolf who’s a bit of a flirt. This crying Lycan said he’s a vegetarian, but he’s munching on bacon out of the bag.
Dear Y—,
The chewing gum in that city stretched long and dark underfoot, where everyone had somewhere to go and real quick. If I remember right we relished our not belonging. Offered it like a lime tic tac on every corner we stopped time.
Aileen sits across from a brown butter cake with strawberry jam filling and strawberry buttercream frosting. The savory plus the soft make it the perfect potential spouse; all she has to do is cut in.
They wanted to meet a ghost. Sam said they had to add the adjective benevolent if they didn’t want trouble. Sandy didn’t believe in unbenevolent ghosts.
My shower’s so gross I’ve been hooking up with people to use theirs.
Whoring myself out for a clean shower is a new low. Worse than not having an actual trash can, just a bag hung over a cabinet door. I used to be humiliated about the trash bag situation. Now it’s a high-water mark.
You probably remember it different. You probably remember the sun being so hot we had to close the shades in the middle of the day—that the AC couldn’t keep up, that the floors were sticky. The pizza ovens didn’t help. You probably remember it was the hottest day on record.
Frankie dies and comes back to haunt him. She hadn’t seen him in years when they were alive, hadn’t thought of him since maybe that time someone on TV had a name like his.
Watch out for shirts with horizontal stripes, Abuelita says, because you’re too fat and it looks bad. Best to choose shirts with more slimming patterns. Vertical lines. Solid blacks, nothing lighter than gray. This shirt is O.K., she says, draping it over her ironing board, because the vertical lines pop out.
I loved a bastard. He was awful sometimes but also his parents never married, a true bastard. When we met he was holding a radioactive drink and I wanted to lap it from his hand.
Over half the string is swallowed, its remaining twenty feet coiled in the man’s lap. He’s skinny, this would-be yogi, his flesh taut about his ribs, sunburnt and flaking. It’s been years since he fashioned the string from a long strip of cloth—twisted it into a braid and knotted it every five inches.
Andrea tells me this part of Florida is known for its white sand beaches—not like the trashier Atlantic side with its brown sand, murky waters, and medical waste. I tell her it must also be known for air so thick and yewmid (I say it how Andrea pronounces it) that a minute outside of our air-conditioned condo is an asthma attack.
2017
When he dreams now, all of his dreams seem tied to food, and all of the food is tied to memory. And the dreams he remembers most clearly are the ones that go back a long way, to the farthest jurisdictions of memory. Back to when he was a boy in Augusta, short enough to pass beneath the counter without bumping his head.
When my mother says it’s nice to see me again I know she means her love for me could fill a lake, because when she told me she left a lizard in my room it was a crocodile…
Caitlin enunciates the words mother and kitchen and mopping like each syllable has scrubbing properties, like she’s flossing with vowels, cleaning her mouth out for Mr. Gilcrest, our drama teacher. She hopes he’ll notice her A-plus-elocution and become her love slave.
x got off the c train & plodded through the port authority doors around 8 // the line at au bon pain snaked all the way to the pay phones on the wall // but it seemed to be going fast //
Things had gone bad, and toilet paper was out of the budget. Luckily, Griff's place was a quick walk from Walmart. At any hour he could crash in, deliver a clenched hello to the greeter, and, a few steps later, void himself in a corporate environment. No men's room door, just a labyrinthine entryway; no paper towels, just weapons-grade blowers; and best of all, no questions.
When you're a failure at everything else, write a novel. That was the first line of my novel, spoken by Dorian Vandercleef—musician, artist, and social provocateur. My main character would never achieve fame, but I was confident this novel was my ticket to literary stardom.
If Tara hadn’t crossed the rope bridge that bounced over the dry creek, she wouldn’t have agreed to go whitewater rafting with David and her camp counselor and the camp counselor’s girlfriend with the long, red highlights. Tara wouldn’t have laughed after the water roared in her face and the cold clapped away her breath.
Although he has observed her in the hallway before (usually sporting white earphones, cord trailing to the iPhone in her back jeans’ pocket), today is different because she also clutches a notebook, the expensive kind (what is it called? mole something?) he saw on a Barnes & Noble display a few weeks earlier while shopping with his parents, and observing this girl again
Mom worried that Gertie didn’t have any friends. Gertie never asked to go to someone’s house, and the avocado green phone that hung next to the refrigerator never rang for her. She didn’t talk about other kids from school. She didn’t talk much period.
"Your parents told me I could have a pool party on my last night,” Lori said.
She finished rubbing baby oil into her legs and spritzed her hair with Sun-In. I treaded water. My parents hired Lori to look after me so they could “work on their marriage” in Hawaii …
Here is Lacy in the Snacks aisle of the drugstore, a cornucopia of sweet and savory goodness. Here are the enticing rows of potato chips, corn chips, pretzels, cookies, cakes. Here are the brightly lit refrigerators with their myriad juices and colas and wine coolers.
Back in Minnesota, my mother is preparing to preach a sermon to her conservative congregation about how it is God's plan for us to welcome Muslims into our communities in no uncertain terms. She fully expects to be booed out of the pulpit and possibly fired, but she is doing it because she knows it is right.
It’s a shameful thing to discover your ten-year-old stepson sucking face with his foot-tall Princess Amidala doll. In broad daylight. For anyone walking by his room to see. I’m quiet at first; I’m not here to give the kid a complex.
It was at exactly 2: 22 Mountain Time when all the dogs started barking and howling, no growling, no whining, and the Light Sleepers woke first, and started yelling hush, and the more Concerned Sleepers got out of bed to see why their dogs were barking…
That night, I heard the sound of someone being killed. Not simply dying, being killed. It was a scraping, metal sound. I was the last to leave work that night, locking the back door behind me.
Picture this: you go to drinks with Mr. Clean. You’re attracted to him—he’s serious, quiet, laughs softly at your jokes. “We could go back to my place,” you say. Mr. Clean nods, not that enthusiastically. He’s playing it cool.
We Californians don’t know volcanoes, at least not the active kind. We don’t appreciate the viscosity of molten lava, for instance. We can’t distinguish between lava and magma, though we’re fairly certain either one can kill you.
Put the brush down for one goddamn second, her father says. But she doesn’t. She won’t. She stands by the kitchen window and pulls the brush through her hair, thick and wavy, the glory of it all fanning behind her in the sunlight like a mermaid’s.
I am standing on the corner in my blue flannel nightgown that I’ve had since high school, waiting for the bus to come in. Cesar is on that bus, I know it. I saw him get on at Geary and Van Ness when he switched from the 28-Geary downtown to the 43-Van Ness to the beach.
Our neighborhood had two in-ground pools, and I never got to swim in either one.
The fancy, lagoon pool may not have really looked like a lima bean. I never saw it, only heard the Jackson 5 music vibrating into my bedroom during one of the Smith’s* frequent evening pool parties.
Harrison watches as the woman on the screen arches her back and plumps her behind into the air. He delights in the suppleness of her exposed breasts, of the nipples that sit taut in a whisper of cotton candy pink, of her hair: a shock of blonde cut sharply at the chin. She wears nothing more than straps that wrap around her thighs and peak at her hips.
It’s a wedding where I run into my ex. I’m on one of those awkward one-date-onlys with a plain girl named Brittany, and Maggie looks amazing.
Congratulations on the purchase of your Gower & Knightcross EasyDawn 200™ Alarm Clock with AM/FM/MP3 wake tones and customizable lighting options. CAUTION: Lamp becomes hot! Do not place any object on top of lamp.
Becca lost her head when the elephant came to town. Five stories tall and made of metal with a horned eyeless head, the elephant tried not to knock down buildings but knocked down buildings anyway.
This time it wasn’t a drill. Crouched beneath our desks in our third grade classroom, window shades pulled down as a deterrent against thermonuclear radiation, I heard the lone Russian bomber elude our jet fighters, flying so far above them that I could imagine our machine gun bullets drifting up at it like a shower of soft windblown raindrops.
2016
You arrive a bit late, trying to be polite, giving Margaret extra time to prepare, but you are last and your carefully selected bottle of cabernet franc will not be enjoyed. Twin bottles of Bogle chardonnay and merlot are already open on the buffet, and mellow Margaret greets your entrance with enthusiasm.
During our brief time together, Brandon made one accurate statement. Almost everything that came out his mouth-his political conspiracy theories, soliloquies of the ego, the tales about fistfights and shady dealings he thought I’d find sexy as hell-was bullshit.
It was an accident. An accident? It was the steady ground suddenly tilting into the steep sides of a gorge, and the shitty path and its shitty cracks turned into crumbling rock giving way under shittier shoes, the ones that were going to be thrown out and replaced with the new season because these had paid their dues and there was supposed to be just enough traction for a few more weeks of Weather, before Weather gave way to Heat.
There’s a girl on the softball team in love with her bat. You see them together, in the storage room. You hear her whispers, hear her sighs. She says you can’t tell anyone. Says she’ll break your fingers if you do.
She woke up thinking carpet. It had fallen out of fashion, she knew. Everyone wanted hardwood floors these days. But now carpet seemed like the right idea, the cure, the fix, so obvious that it was embarrassing.
The honeymoon year was a home-cooking adventure, joyful domesticity inside Storybook cottage. They cooked love notes for each other in the form of casseroles. The couple lost The Magic quickly though.
In the morning we split up the MDMA we stole from Todd’s older brother between the four of us. We thought it was MDMA. It looked a lot like the picture we saw on Erowid so we figured we’d be okay but sure enough we were all staring at the mounds of white powder in front of us, unsure how to consume it, when Todd said we were going to be late for our last day of high school.
My son comes for a rare visit on his horse — contemplate the gall of it. He ties off to my mailbox. Destrier stamps marigolds; it looks like the End Times have started in my yard. “Come in, son,” I say, and pat his back with a halfhug. He pushes a paper bag into my hands.
She makes a game out of hiding the bottles in the woods. Her father goes to work building whatever building needs building that week, sometimes driving as far out as Sullivan County down old M12. L puts down her book—her father likes to see her reading, let him know he's done this one thing right—and tiptoes into the kitchen. She doesn't need to be quiet but that's part of what makes it like a game.
A boy in my high school showered three times a day. He wore sunglasses inside and had sex with my best friend. Their families vacationed in Florida at the same time.
The year after their baby died, they sold their furniture, her skis, his table saw. Then they donated most of their clothes. They asked to see tiny houses, no larger than 500 square feet. “Bill and I are buying a house on wheels,” Amanda told their families. “We’re going to travel like gypsies.”
I received your letter two months after marrying Mike. The letter was printed in blue Courier font and the graphics were abysmal.
Maybe he shouldn’t call her that. Too girly. A diminutive pet name focusing on what she looks like. Too old fashioned, he worries, something not for girls anymore these days, something his parents’ or grandparents’ generation would have said alongside white picket fences and a green, well-manicured lawn, the station wagon in the driveway, its cargo top filled with the colors of summer escapes. She’s more than that.
After supper, we took the kids down to the road next to Bryson's Pond to see the body. Picture ran in yesterday's paper of the accident. The kind of thing that makes news in our small town: smashed up car with the hood rammed through the interior and door sheared off, its body leaning against the telephone pole like a drunk too afraid to take another step.
A cop car pulled up next to me as I stood at the crosswalk of the empty intersection, on an empty summer night. I heard the static of dispatch through the car’s open window.
In bleached out archival footage that never really existed, I learn about Amelia Earhart. I see her tear-scrunched face held together in a blindfold on some island that happened to catch her little propeller plane that couldn’t quite. For whatever reason, it just couldn’t quite.
Samantha and I are both “the babies” when we play house. Samantha has better dolls, so we stage our house in her bedroom. Her closet doors are mirrored, and so when we play house, it’s like there are four of us—Samantha, Samantha’s twin, me, my twin—and when we skip and dance and laugh, we multiply even more.
Mom loved that eagle cam so bad. She watched it like she watched NASCAR and Seinfeld in the 90s. Two feet from the screen and both hands in a bag of Martins. All day she stayed glued.
Great. Now you’re crying in the middle of giving a blowjob. Luckily, Steve the engineer isn’t paying attention to your face. With a mouthful of his cock, and one of your hands pumping double time, he better be completely transported.
2015
T-SRB, the one-time unrepeatable success of simple-to-complex mechanics and anti-oxidation aerosols, rubber gaskets and greased bearings, runs entirely by the perpetual-motion heart. Estimated half-life: six-thousand years.
The pipe bomb will be eight inches in length, two inches in diameter. It will contain shards of broken glass, some nails, a few screws. It will be born after Jimmy Reed has one bad day too many, after Matt Lacey hip-checks him face-first into his locker, after the right lens of Jimmy’s glasses cracks and the frame bends and the air vents scrape his sideways-turned head, drawing blood.
Dean keeps asking me hypotheticals. Takes swigs of vodka and raises his pool cue for another shot. “How ‘bout you were in a day-old toilet, and shit is all you have to eat. Would you eat it or would you rather die?” I take my turn and tell him if he asks me one more question I will pose my own, and he won't like his choice between death and death.
Many years ago, my wife and I were living in New York City together making landscape drawings. We were squatting in this abandoned apartment, so whatever money we made we spent on movies and food. We had a friend who worked at an art house cinema, and she gave us free popcorn—we saw lots of foreign movies and bad student films.
Things were almost over between us, but we didn't know that. It was a mild December. You needed help moving your belongings from the dorm to your parents' house for the holidays. We spent a whole half-hour sorting and discarding the minefield of your car.
She peeled an orange and found an avocado, the sort of week it had been. The feel of buttery green on her tongue failed to be what she needed as she ate it. Between trips to the cleaners, the library, the morgue, she held her hands steady on the wheel— the grip of an adult, certain and not trembling, her gaze definitely not looking left at the swish of angels, their wings like a coat of rain across the grass.
No one I know has ever been to Taliaferro County, so I don’t believe it’s real. There is data out that says it has 1,700 or so residents and I’ve never met a single one. The closest I’ve come is I found a couple guys in a bar in Atlanta one night who said they owned a few thousand acres in Taliaferro between the two of them.
That part of me yet unclaimed the girl’s body before the baby before the boy before the first opening my fingers my hands I want that skin that soft unscarred belly those breasts not yet bursting suns I want that body back I want her…
Smack me with what you know, baby, I’m asking for it. Make those ten dollar words zip like a switch, make that jargon sizzle. Sting me with words you can correctly pronounce so I’ll stop suspecting you don’t know as much as you think you do.
They lived in Indiana together in a red, brick house. A famous writer lived there before them and left a signed map of New York City taped over the solid Midwestern writing desk. They wrote in bed, on the second story of the house. They began thousands of stories they never finished, Lucky Dragon, Going to Colorado, a whole host of aborted voyages.
When the caterpillar is crawling in the dish, do not measure it with your ruler. Do not classify it according to the phases of growth illustrated in the chart in your book. These were the things of seventh grade. Now you are in eight grade and must interact with the caterpillar on a new level.
Outside was a man {had she seen him before?}. A non-descript man. He could have been any man. When she answered the door, it was about three seconds before he threw a vile lie in her face {a vial of lye}.
2014
Yesterday, Marilyn from the web team brought me lunch from Snyder’s deli and I had to ask, What’s up? as if I did not know what her weekly check-in would bring me.
That time my dad took me camping by the Eel River at the Fortuna KOA. As we lay under the stars with the fire dying, he told me people eat spiders in their sleep—hundreds in a lifetime. They crawl toward the smell. “Don’t be a mouth-breather,” he said, and then he rolled over.
It is said all man’s misdeeds may be attributed to Armabrach, a species of atom that swims the blood tides and makes savage man’s heart, clouds his brain and perplexes his eyes.
Because of him, she bought her first pair of thong underwear. She paints her sad, short fingernails. She looks at the mirror as he fucks her from behind, wondering about her ass. Cellulite? Ingrown hair? She takes action, exfoliating, sweating in the sauna, hours of exercise.
We double-dutched in seventh grade and beat the girls from room 209 to win that trophy made of wire hangers and cardboard then went for pizza, grease sliding off the cheese like syrup. We chewed the rim of Styrofoam cups, spitting at one another and laughing. Then from our identical porches only a few feet away, I saw the pink and black thread from your friendship bracelet coming undone.
2013
You can spend your time in the card aisle, but it’ll most likely just be wasted. There’s not much solace in those cards, not much heart or feeling or sincerity. Just little words like “Sorry” or “Condolences” that just translate to “I didn’t take the time before and I can barely be bothered now.”
“Well, what about tomorrow after lunch,” she suggested, squinting up at him even with her sunglasses on. He was tall and she liked that. He was looking somewhere beyond her, over her left shoulder though his body was turned toward her close enough, she could tell he was looking at the three women who had just walked by them, she could still see their silhouettes in his glasses.
Led Zeppelin has a history in my pants. They’ve lived and migrated all up and down my bra and underwear. They took up residence up in my pants when I was a heaping 14-year-old, crossing over from Depeche Mode, Echo and the Bunnymen, to make a passage backward in time with the drop of the needle on vinyl.
Even if it means no nachos, I don’t want to do any more of that hateful teaching! People who have never done any teaching seem to have difficulty understanding how I feel about this. Jesus, I’m drunk as a stolen hard drive. My hands are crying.
Jude discharges liquid through her mouth all morning. She suffers from the opposite of motion sickness—she can’t handle the stillness. I take her to the mountains to find the longest, the curviest road. A road that starts and stops without expectation.
I don’t think Ferdinand should make any decisions about what to do with his life today. Nor should Mother. I, on the other hand, am no longer young and vital, and if I don’t make any decisions, they will certainly be made for me.
The obsession started when he was young. Coke cans. We were never sure why. They had to be Coke Classics, and they had to come from an Atlanta bottling plant. It took seven hundred and ninety-three to completely fill his wall space, an odd number because he left a spot for his light switch.
2012
One late summer evening, the air had finally cooled and a Twain-ish kind of peace was aloft on the breeze. I decided to go for a walk and clear my mind before retiring. While & within my steps, I looked up and remembered how beautifully clear heaven can be.
Scott was so literal. We told him “break a leg” before he went on stage, and then he fell down the prop stairs and snapped his tibia in two places. The show didn’t go on for Scott. He was taken by ambulance to Riverside Community, and his understudy had to stuff his hair under a skin cap quick.
My mother says that she was young too, once upon a time. She says this in the cold dressing room of a department store the day before we leave for our last trip overseas. The people around us smell strong, like the babysitter she just fired who used so much perfume my nose hurt and kept frying bacon I wasn’t allowed to eat.