
DENVER by Tess Pollok
He was angry. He was scared of her. He was scared of the post office. Everything is on accident or everything is on purpose or everything is both.

He was angry. He was scared of her. He was scared of the post office. Everything is on accident or everything is on purpose or everything is both.

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.

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.

The crack widened at last and cleaved the porch in two. The tree had effected a crack that, the men saw, was surprisingly neat. The work of the devil, said Fred.