He wasn’t afraid to crack a grin, in the most colorful sweater, a bejeweled crown atop his head, raising a glass of his favorite cocktail to let the world know he is still kicking it, even in death’s hallows.
The old say to the young: 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥 𝘪𝘴 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘰𝘺𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳. And when the old men speak these words, they are sincere, because the world has been delivered unto them, and the world is now theirs to bestow.
I breathed in the piss scent of the alleyway through the black knit. Then my face emerged from beyond the shirt, and I stood facing the dead end of the alley holding my breasts with one forearm.
i thought i was prepared for friends and strangers to be able to glimpse some of my innermost thoughts, but sometimes i get a wave of anxiety: is it too much?
She rode her pony here and he stinks like old socks—there’s no bond better than between a woman and her pony. I note she wears striped leotards right up to her loincloth.
At two in the afternoon, she hears a bang like a gunshot. Eugenia peeks out her bedroom window. What’s visible to her: the Tangs’ barbecue pit, their garden shed, their kidney-shaped pool. She counts dead oval leaves trapped on the water. Must be the Tang brothers lighting firecrackers behind the shed again, she thinks. They’re always plotting to give the birds a heart attack. Forefingers stuffed in her ears, she wonders why the brothers aren’t studying, and from where do they get their sadistic toys? But if the Gohs across the street managed to smuggle in flamingos to chain to
I’m in class reading Hamlet and contemplating suicide on a cliffside. Reciting poetic verses about family curses and hiding behind a curtain with a knife. My phone buzzes, and I lean forward to read something out of a Shakespearean tragedy. She killed someone. The words glow like the flame of a lit match and I spring from my desk chair, repelled by their heat. Faces swivel toward me, judgement radiating from their eyes. I’m an injured animal at the center of a swarm about to be mauled by my own pack. My heartbeat radiates in my ears: glove to a
What film, or films, made the first deep impression on you? My aunt and uncle on Long Island, for whatever reason, had a big-box VHS copy of I Spit on Your Grave in their collection, nestled somewhere between Stripes and Mr. Mom. I never asked about it, or even watched it, but it always kind of confused me. I thought it was a porno or something. I finally ended up watching I Spit on Your Grave as a teenager, which made me thankful that I didn’t watch it as a child, though I did accidentally catch A Clockwork Orange on
She woke up in a classroom. Chalkboard at her head, corkboard at her feet. As she adjusted to the dusk light—was it 5 a.m. or 5 p.m.?—she discovered she wasn’t in the setting of a recurring dream she’d been having. The ‘I fell asleep at the desk and missed the most important test of a lifetime’ dream. No, she was in a hotel room. The Eaton. The card pinned to the corkboard wall held her personalized key to the rooftop gym. As she pressed her body against the hotel room window, the humidity moved through the glass and brushed up