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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Read MoreWe 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.
Read MoreElizabeth 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.
Read MoreJust 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…
Read MoreYour 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.
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