Do you know how much I look at bodies? I say. What? My mother says. We are at the kitchen table again, sitting across from one another the same as every night, drinking black tea she squeezes lemon into. We build a puzzle we’ve been …
Airports are a place devoid of time and existence. Life stops once you step onto the unloading curb, the thick smell of car exhaust and hot tarmac burning your nose. Flights can be as late as they want and you have no control. Drinking beer …
After decades of stand-up, the comedian sits down to watch the news. What else is there? He practices the clarinet and irons out the details of cancelled shows over the phone, but the days are long. He doesn’t require much sleep. Sometimes he senses the …
It was the first time Dad hadn’t worked in 59 years. He didn’t want to retire, but the doctor encouraged him to at least only work part-time and find some relaxing hobbies, for his blood pressure’s sake. He already exercised. He walked around the block …
On the day I am “celebrating” my t-minus one month due date, I have an argument with my husband about writing our wills. “We don’t have anything to will to anyone,” doesn’t fly with him, despite the fact that a mortgage company in Omaha owns …
Alma had been thinking about cannibals all Sunday afternoon. It started at lunch when she was eating the roast-beef sandwich that her aunt Nancy had made, and she began wondering what baby Ellie would taste like. Nancy had gone outside to rake up the dead …
“Why am I a white male character?” The author, looking coldly into his half-written manuscript, responds, “Because. I am.”
She looked up just before the rocks became roots and the ancient cypress trees surrounded her. A nebulous cloud of sickly white stretched across the sky with patches of it undulating like the underside of cardboard with the first layer torn off.
We are not always born to our people. I was born to an octopus. She had long tentacles that were ever reaching and seething and monstrous.
“I feel like my life is a movie,” you say. We are freezing under the single sheet of my twin bed, the newly wine-stained comforter in a pile on the floor. Before I spilled my glass of Trader Joe’s finest merlot, which we’d bought to …
