
MEAT by Nathan Cover
What they couldn’t see: his heart pumping arterial and venial dilated with rage at being short but filled with fearless venom.

What they couldn’t see: his heart pumping arterial and venial dilated with rage at being short but filled with fearless venom.

We were always competing for not-worst drunk. But we were also secretly competing for worst drunk. So both of us always won. And lost.

If I could only stay kind and beautiful, I, too, could survive on the happiness contained in a single shot of frat boy whiskey. But I always had trouble with kindness.

“They don’t feel anything, do they?” she says. He smiles at her. His smile says, who cares if they do.

He knows without a shadow of a doubt that he cannot die. It makes him reckless in a way everyone loves, except for Steve-O.

Mosi is Sprite, Banji is Coca Cola. Whoever loses, does the rounds to check for hippos that might have strayed too far.

Frogs are thought to have a simplified version of our anatomy, which makes them all the more reasonable subjects for high school dissections.

The music lifted like a cosmic prayer. Then the collective scream: the squawk, the beef and bleat of the slaughter, a rumbling dusk arcing across the auditorium.

I’m about to reverse out when I think–drunk kid. In my car. And I’m drunk. Maybe a bad idea.

But there are two kinds of shame: the kind that you cannot speak the words to, even in your head, and the kind you can’t stop talking about. I told the story for years.