I don’t smoke, I called out, but no one heard me, and I sounded uncertain. 

The grass here is incessant.

A deep hole.

It wasn’t my fault we started talking.

Ess saw it first at 2:03 AM.

Do you remember this one?

It was cloudy most days.

When it is morning morning I dress myself in nice human clothes. I am ready to leave the garden, but I do not leave the garden.

Do us in quick, I begged, do me easy.

Perhaps we are simply trying to figure out how to stay inside a relationship – our relationship – and figure out how to physically exit the space we currently inhabit and enter another. 

I was seventeen, so he was a man — had I been older, maybe not.

Show her face to the camera. Put your finger in her mouth.

Here is your neighbor, blood forking from her nose, catching on her lip. 

He’s soaked in sweat already and all he’s done is drive. He must know what they are here to find.

I always knew I would wash up on an island.

When I was thirty I found my birth mom. I’d written her letters but never sent them.

This is a frontier town. Means it’s small. 

Now, if the frontier was moving forward, like they do sometimes, our town might get bigger, but that ain’t happened for nigh on eighty years and I don’t

They gather in the basement to weep together like the boys they are.

There was a Help Wanted sign at the florists. I had a car, so I walked in and applied. This was a time in my life when I’d decided anyone could do anything. In other words, I was an artist.

That morning, I rolled over with the intention of apologizing. I'd meant everything I'd said, but none of it was enough for me to end anything. It was the hazards of a relationship; I had to decide if I was losing myself or becoming better.

I read the article and passed her the phone.

On the drive home, I waited in the dark of the third-row seat for Z to act, reach for my hand or kiss my cheek. But he wouldn’t do anything until college, until I cornered him in the bathroom at a Halloween party and forced the space between us to shrink.

Picture a baby shower.

“This one’s kind of a dud,” he said, turning the page. “It’s fine, but I’m not sure where it goes.”
“That’s like me on this path,” she said.
“It’s really not.”

The best wrestler he'd ever seen.