He said that Thompson could be the fastest to hit five hundred, a first ballot Hall of Famer, but I just nodded and sipped my coffee.
Take your pick. Me, they said I hung my off-speed stuff, lost track of the count, lacked mental toughness. I waved off too many signs.
The smell of grilled hot dogs is in the near distance.
After tonight, I’ll be demoted to my parents’ couch and a job at my uncle’s lumberyard.
It tasted like apple cider — apple and something astringent — cinnamon, a strong cinnamon, warming, brown sugar, and sprinkled throughout the loaf, unadvertised, was some kind of dried fruit with a mild taste — raisins, probably — partially rehydrated by the thawing process.
My mother and father are stuck in an optic deadlock, her looking at him like she is trying to solve a puzzle or remember the name of a particular film, him looking like he’s just deciphered answers to both.
I’m on a date with this dude, the guy’s gorgeous, and ripped, skin all sunburnt like a surfer with... more
You elaborate: Christmas just makes people emotional. "No," she says, raking at her hair with French-tipped nails. "I don't think so."
We’re riding the red line south when Xue suggests stopping in Chinatown to purchase thousand-year eggs. I picture her... more
Also, every time they flew and he had that damn backpack on, he forgot that the space he occupied extended beyond his physical back. He whacked bystanders in the shoulders or the chest, and, at least once, the face.
Before that, the father had been away. It was a time that many fathers were away.
They bang their silverware and take turns slamming the toilet seat. They drag their garbage bins too late to the curb and leave them abused by stark weathers all week. Shaker knows there is an awkward progenitor situation.
I have coffee in my cup. I could toss the hot liquid on her and rush through the revolving door to my appointment, make her the slug.
Dixie leaned against the door, feeling the blood rush to one side before pounding it against the wood.
I’d scratch them by stretching out my fingers wide like cheerleading jazz hands and rub them up and down aggressively along our itchy wall to wall carpeted floors.
Being Jack’s a guy, he’s also tasked with the act of pulling my ass apart when needed so the Radiation Oncologist, Dr. Katz, a short petite woman of prissy demeanor who does her ass work in civilian clothes, even while wearing heels and a tiny purse strapped across her midsection, can insert her finger.
Four days after the initial shit, another pile of human shit was found, this time by the foreman himself, who was checking the inventory of an item located in an ill-lit and rarely visited corner of the warehouse. He immediately called a meeting.
I want to deny him but he’s playin’ it natural and attentive. He’s good but I ain’t sure if he knows he’s good or if he’s just as polite as he’s coming off.
She looked better and better to herself in his bathroom mirror as she washed up and got all ready to spend the night with him in his warm bed.
I put a stone at each corner of the paper to hold it still beneath the fan in our bedroom. The instructions were simple.
A furniture delivery arrives, as my mother warned me upon leaving for the store that it might, and two nieces who have hidden themselves in a cabinet come out at the sound of the doorbell to ogle the brightly-colored truck in the driveway.
Jeanette has gotten many notes in bars before. Many men have spoken to her too.
My sister called me the morning after that dream to tell me that the family cat was dying. It was the last cat that was still alive from the time I had lived with my parents.
"I didn't want to ever be outside of this moment. I knew at some point I would look at the picture I'd just taken and feel an overwhelming sense of loss. I thought as long as we could manage to stay inside this particular hotel room, to avoid our phones and every person with whom we'd ever come into contact, we would continue to feel whole. We were revolutionaries, goddamnit. These were our accumulation of beautiful moments. Before the world fractured us. I don't expect you to understand how I became Brad Pitt in that moment, how we all just flew along down the highway. Bandits. Ex-patriots. In love with this countryside, if not this country. Paper Moon. The Last Picture Show. All of this shot in black and white. Only the final scene in color."
FOUR NEW ESSAYS BY CHLOE CALDWELL! Plus the original essays that made you fall in love with Chloe!
Jason Phoebe Rusch is a queer writer from the Chicago suburbs. His full-length debut Dualities explores gender and patriarchy from the perspective of a man who was socialized and is currently still read as a woman. He is interested in complication and nuance and messy human failing, his own and that of others.
