He blew smoke from a loaned cigarette back into my hair, bar rag still in his back pocket from the shift that ended two hours ago. He didn’t understand why I didn’t want him to come over. “Surrender to the stuff, baby.” 

Listen to your mother.

She of the red lipstick, the garish slash of mouth that looks like you... more

The funeral is over, Eliza is back at work, and she has eaten dinner at home three times now, once alone, even.

The king’s first wife went crazy and no longer obeyed him, so he sent her away.

“Mrs. Bolthuis wants you to help her with something. Ride over there and see what she wants. Homework can wait for once.”

“If you have to say you’re fine, you’re probably not,” the crow replied.

Lenore was at the cusp. I’m cusping, Percy, she rasped. Percy was unsure what to do about it. Press forward? Hang back?

Married twenty years today, Heather and Vic play that game.

They walked along the railroad somewhere in Atlanta on a cold and bitter night, the full moon above them like a yellow coin... more

There is a crawl space in my lover’s house that his wife and children don’t know about. He likes to sing into it when he’s drunk and he’s only drunk when he’s with me.

A city wide boil advisory is still out. Brain eating amoebas were detected in the tap.

Q-tips were her guilty pleasure. She loved the feel of them caressing her inner ear, reaching the itch she could otherwise not scratch.... more

We heard something Anglo, unhinged, too human. We’d been hoping for Shrimp killing Cow or Cow killing Shrimp, but it was you, Bitcha, flailing and teetering about in the night sky.

Toward the end, when heart disease had already taken my father, and my mother was alone—which she found intolerable—her doctors felt she had... more

She had us trade cardigans. She said it was an exercise in empathy. 

If you get this far, that means that things are all, more or less, going according to plan.

He was in love with his friend Faye, had known her since elementary school.

I was only doing what she asked:  Not listening. 

The Christian Movie Theatre is mainly for fans of poorly translated morality tales, the violent ends of saints and so forth.

Despite your better judgement, you click on his profile and then on the most recent post: a picture of him smiling on a white slope with his arm wrapped around a remarkably average, yet still somehow traditionally hot (not pretty, just hot) snow bunny.

I count the number of murderers in the class.

There was something that she wished to start, and when she started it, she figured, her life would take on new meaning. But in this moment in time, she ate breakfast bars all hours of the day and worried about money.

I thought, this message probably killed its messenger, strung out on finding its way home.

Nick your shin shaving, stare idly at the blood coursing down your foot and down the drain, and maybe this is how you do it, empty out all your insides until your shapeless skin is all that’s left.

I wanted to be “that girl,” but my new high-waisted pants from the Marais were already unbuttoned once.