When I was little, my best friend Tamara and I stole. She was a year older than I was, treated me like a little sister, and taught me all the ropes. We wore sweaters on hot summer days, dresses too big for us, huge pants with pockets. 

That afternoon she insisted I wheelchair her to the gunfight.

WEED MILEY. Come back to us Weed Miley. I plonk down on the water sofa. Weed Miley screams into the mirror. She had invited me to join them. Weed Miley talks here, I then talk. Weed Miley enters wearing a cloth nightgown.

The cartels were losing the battle. Everywhere they dug they met a new obstacle. There was freshly poured concrete down their northwest tunnel. They discovered recently installed top of the line micro security cameras. They came face to face with growling German shepherds. 

On that rainy morning of that last day, I delivered some homemade ajiaco, Colombian chicken soup, to my mother, and my ex-girlfriend who was expecting a child that might be her husband’s or mine.

The Club pursues a shaky business proposition, and Jax must decide where his allegiances... more

The night I saw you on TV, I thought of the toads.

The ones we carried onto the roof of your house with a slingshot that afternoon when no one was home.

The day we met, you told me Los Angeles was home but that you were born in Houston. It was the insurance company’s orientation day for new employees, and you were standing alone at the far table, looking around with hesitation, like a child on the first day of school.

She’s still searching for hers but isn’t jealous. She’s happy I finally found my med. I take it in the morning with my cereal, and... more

I was a loser and I was a fifth grader and I was hoping, never prayin’, to watch somebody open a can of whoop ass on The Stevens... more

The officer put me on the street behind my truck. I felt the control. It didn’t feel good. 

Naoko knew all too well how difficult it was to imbibe the air of a foreign culture. She had matriculated for a year at the University of Santa Barbara to study saxophone and marked each day as a progression from one shameful moment to the next.

It’s that night in the summer when your open windows mean nothing, when your bed is just stuffed heat

My daughter stood on tiptoe by the metal grocery cart and told me we needed two more bags of Colby Jack. 

He had a disciplined approach to all things that surely came from the military. For breakfast it was always two hard boiled eggs – you imagined he swallowed them whole – but on the road, he allowed one indulgence: a short stack of pancakes.

If I had to choose one moment that convinced me of my own insignificance, it would be that time I saw the world spin.

“I was just thinking about you,” he emailed, a week later. “I’m rereading The Bell Jar.”

They were not in Brooklyn, California, a nice suburb outside D.C.

They were in West Virginia.

Hey, here’s an idea: how about you don’t spend half the period texting your boyfriend, and then he won’t dump you in the middle of class. Ever think of that? Maybe you talk to him like a human being instead of sending him a bunch of fucking sideways sad faces. 

The first line in the Medieval Times employee handbook is “The King always wins” even though really it’s the Champion Knight who wins and every move of the nightly joust is scripted to ensure that always happens...

Everyday we took Jelly for a walk on the track.
If Julia was busy teaching, Scott and I took Jelly.
If Scott was busy teaching, Julia and I took Jelly.

My friend Jamie holds out a thistle bloom, her fingers curved gingerly around the prickles. “Eat this,” she says. 

Anthony was my reason for everything ... for South Park, for Tupac, for horror movies, for music that sounded like screaming, for my parents' vodka, my sister’s mascara, for all the girls I put down.

What we really wanted was to be older.  What we really wanted was for something to happen, take us away from Florida and into the rest of our lives, but that doesn't happen for teenagers, not so much, and so we stood and waited.

Civil War Day was a staple at Reginald Middle School, implemented somewhere in the shady patriotism of the Reagan era before carrying through as tradition.