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.
“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...
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.
In the original cut of the movie, Ray says, “You wanna have a catch?” But test audiences were disappointed with the complete lack of father-son acknowledgement.
That’s what your parents say when they come in with their Santa suits. But it’s not Saturday. It’s Tuesday. It’s time to go to school.
At the age of sixteen I worked a job digging holes. Sometimes it was ditches, other times it was retention ponds.The work was as hard as... more
We agreed to meet in a bar known as the ‘anus of the city.’ It had terrible lighting which obscured its ugly regulars. The regulars had heads like onions with names like Fred, Harry, Deborah, Henrietta. Years of drinking had withered their necks to the size of cocktail sticks and I didn’t pity them because I liked hating them.
The main thing about washing dishes at Ronny’s Café is I can come into work pretty fucked up and no one seems to notice—least of all Todd.
A 400-page collection of poems in fours sections: Nicki Minaj Songs, Bob Dylan Songs, Elliott Smith Songs, and 90s Riot Grrrls Songs.
ON SALE for only $5 through June 15!!
FOUR NEW ESSAYS BY CHLOE CALDWELL! Plus the original essays that made you fall in love with Chloe!
ON SALE for only $5 through June 15!!
Saul Stories is a linked collection that explores the relationships between a forty-year-old female artist, her teenaged daughter, and her daughter's friends. With ferocious realism, the book interrogates how children of differing classes and races are treated in the U.S., and the salacious and skeptical ways the current culture views cross-generational friendships. But most potently—in narratives taking place in Denny's and movie theatres and living rooms and cars—Saul Stories wonders what it means to be a woman and an artist and a mother, all at once.
