My profile was very clear. In my photo my lips were puckered, my eyes narrowed seductively. Rose emojis meant I wasn’t giving freebies. I talked a big game on the app, but I had only turned one trick so far and had no idea what I was doing.
The chugging train slowed, then sighed to a halt over the England-Scotland border, the so-called station a mere strip of platform engulfed in endless verdant meadow dotted with clots of creamy sheep.
Why waste energy saying you know what I mean in five separate words when you can smush them together and let them fall off the tongue like your drunk ass down the stairs after several bottles of MD 20/20?
I am lost in a sky of turbulence and haze—and to be lost is to never be home. Today is the first day of the year; it is also the first year you are not around.
I gripped a dirty pint. Sometimes I hold a glass and feel the urge to grip it till it breaks. This was one of those times.
On the white sand, I stand with a man who doesn’t love me and we watch a bald eagle–big as a boy–bent over something bloody.
The foamless rectangle was greenish-blue, an institutional color, not a tropical one, and it smelled like something meant to clean dishes or toilets or floors, not human hair, not fourteen-year-old girls’ bodies.
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.
Male emperor penguins protect their eggs from the harsh Antarctic elements by balancing them on their feet. When I tell you this, you lift me up and balance me on your feet. I am four and weigh nothing. You are a mountain of a man. With my tiny feet stacked atop your larger feet, you hold my hands and start taking wide, steady steps. We pass the balcony, and I feel the warmth of sunlight as it filters through the glass door to fall onto our bodies. Our shadows dance on the floor tiles like puppets. Then, I am flying.
In an eastern New Mexico desert, amid a forest of mesquite and bluestem grass, overlooking nothing but miles upon miles of iron-pressed, sunbaked earth, sits the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP for short). On the surface, it looks like any other government base: a simple grid of unremarkable squat buildings, the tan color of which bleeds into the surrounding arid landscape. But step into one of the elevators that spend their days bobbing up and down WIPP’s vertical mine shafts, ferrying hard-hatted workers between ground level and the ancient salt bed 2,150 feet below, and it’s a different story. One