When we were kids, my sister kicked this boy.

I went looking for her. He went looking for her. She went looking for her. They went looking for her. 

We all went looking for her.

I look. 
You look. 
He looks. 
She looks. 
They look. 
We

Each year, the clouds lowered. Each year, the boys' hopes crept closer to their grasp.

Arranged in front of Papa were a cup of coffee, his glass eye, and a shot of whiskey.  One by one, they would patch him up before he left for work.  The sun hadn’t yet chinned the horizon, and we sat

 sat on my couch for twenty-four hours popping oxycontin while I watched a full season of Gilmore Girls. Lorelai and Rory were not on speaking terms and I missed my mom.

One evening you come home to discover Boris Yeltsin standing in your kitchen.

Twelve hours later, I surrendered to sleep at a rest stop.

I return to the kitchen and walk in on Jodeci pulling a syringe out of her neck. She takes the rope from my hands and uses it as a tourniquet for my arm.

I look at these evil thoughts you have and evil thoughts you share and still feel like I could heal you, if we could see each other.

Psycho Trev scared the shit out of me. He did the dishes at a Tony’s diner in town. He lived in a singlewide out in the woods and did a lot of shrooms. He had huge parties at his place too.

“Hey buddy, are you alright?” 

The husband looked at me with a smile disguising mild alarm. 

“I’m going to be.” 

The guy looks over and sees me eating my pepper steak. He is a hard blur of hair and grease. For one brief minute, I think he’s going to lasso me or ask me to come over and polish off a bag of pork rinds.

Echo pressed her index finger to the Facebook icon on her phone, opening up a chat with her recent ex, Morgan, who was still typing.

Pete wasn’t looking at me. He was half listening, half joking and trading cash with girls walking men in and out of private rooms.

“You thought about being a dancer?”

My husband is a proficient fighter. He catalogs the inconsistencies between the things I say and things I do. Against this tactic, I have no defense. For he is right, but what he fails to understand is the internal consistency in my inconsistency.

But I didn't feel sick anymore, was the thing. The sweating, capsizing sensation, the kaleidoscope of Muppets I saw square dancing behind my eyelids on that third night when it was legitimately bad, all that had been weeks ago and still everyone brought my mother food. 

“Louis has stopped taking his dose.”

Sarah lowered herself to her knees in front of the fridge, continuing to uselessly rearrange the sanguinium. 

“We think maybe you can spend some extra time with him, maybe get him to start taking it again,” Tim said. “You do great with Dotty.”

Hours later, when all these thoughts and feelings had been erased by his pressing occupations, he got a text from her.
“dont b mad”

“There are some things that just cannot be reconciled,” the duck quacked, as it waddled across the path.

The man was disturbed. There seemed to be no end to the rain's falling, but only he was

We spent most of the night watching Billy Madison and eating ice cream and cookies and building a fort.

Later that night, past midnight, I quietly hear her leave the apartment. I don’t stir. I don’t ask her what, where or why. I stay perfectly still and pretend to be asleep.

I confess my DIY rituals in high school, tiny fires fueled by crumpled notes and dried flowers from lost loves and later, gifts from my parents bought during the divorce. In the smoke, my hope conceived visions: sometimes revenge, always return. Nothing I witnessed was more than smoke

Why bother with the pretense of health or ambition, when the world was ending and there were still snacks, drinks, trysts with another unwashed neighbor?

Everything that could have possibly budged already had, anything neglectable was long ago done so.

The guy on the podcast had cancer, he was dying –every day he was dying a little bit more – and he was reflecting on being a literary agent.