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.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreIn 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.
Read MoreThere’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.
Read MoreDear 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.
Read MoreAileen 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.
Read MoreThey 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.
Read MoreMy 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.
Read MoreFrankie 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.
Read MoreWatch 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.
Read MoreI 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.
Read MoreOver 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.
Read MoreAndrea 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.
Read More