A delivery man came today with a cardboard box. On the outside it says "Handle With Care," "Fragile,” "Do Not Drop." The packing slip says 1 lb. I've never opened a package so carefully. Inside is a shiny wooden box with Azul engraved in gold. My best friend, my 12 year old dog-- my greatest bond-- in a box.
Read MoreI could have been forty-something myself and it would have all seemed normal. This is her new normal and so it is mine. She is practicing for a contest and I want to hide. The brown suede sectional in the living room is disassembled and stacked in a corner, like puzzle pieces fresh from the box. My sister sits on its cushions and watches. I am to be part of the act.
Read MoreThe men I dated when I was 19 and 20 have no names. They used to have faces, but I’m losing them. I can no longer remember lips, hands, chests. I have no pictures, no court-admissible evidence they existed. These men have blurred into one foggy presence, one whose dating routine was shared across the board.
Read MoreMaria, the black-eyed, reticent waitress who’d managed to keep herself alienated from the rest of the staff at my restaurant months after she started working there, liked her nails done. Each month she shelled out what I thought to be an inordinate chunk of her hard-earned tips to a lady who poured liquid acrylic over Maria’s fingertips before shaping, buffing, and polishing them into a flawless French manicure.
Read MoreMy mother created the world.
She controlled her world with rules and schedules, the litany of demands I was born to heed. Rules and schedules reigned over even the most intimate and involuntary of bodily functions, from how a child must train herself to turn carefully in her sleep to avoid messing up the bedcovers, to how she must avoid sneezing or coughing in public lest people think her mother is neglectful of her health, to her bathroom habits.
Read MoreS and I walk along the beach. Something feels different.
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The night before I rode my bike to his house, uninvited. I pedaled thirty miles one way, hoping to meet his mother who was spending the weekend with him. I figured I’d just drop by, make a greeting, and all would be fine.
Read MoreYou wake up on the toilet staring at your dick. You’re naked but you think that’s not so bad because your roommate usually stays at his girlfriend’s house and, even if he’s not there tonight, he drinks as much as you do. You’ll have to walk into the living room and through the kitchen to get to the stairs of your shitty basement room, but if you do it fast he might not see your naked ass. Even if he does, you’ll only get shit about it for a week or two.
Read MoreMy grandmother, in her Golden years, was a collage artist. I remember the stacks of magazines she kept—Life, Time, Parade. Not to read, but to tear apart. Rip. Shred. Whole pages. Single words. Pictures of whatever caught her eye and would fit together with strokes of paint, watercolor, cotton, wire, and wood. She called it mixed media; I called it art.
Read MoreIt was Spring Break during my senior year in college. I’d just flown back from Portland, OR where I spent the week visiting my older brother and sister for the first time since they moved to the West Coast. We did lots of non-Midwest things to celebrate me being out of Chicago traffic for a few days. We went hiking, we climbed mountains.
Read MoreIn the late eighties and early nineties, a movement spread across America. Thousands of people pulled all-nighters cutting and pasting materials out of books and magazines, making countless copies, and sending them out all over the country. They worked diligently to write about their lives and interests, from punk rock and politics to lame jobs and boredom.
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