There’s no room that’s mine. This thought occurred to me plenty as a child, but it was a fact without any emotion attached. I think about it especially when I watch house hunting shows: what a wish list looks like for people who get to choose where they live on purpose.
The first time a boy accidently touches your leg you are fourteen—
I had anted up already: pics in the too-small bikini top he liked, back arched in his favorite Brazilian-cut bottoms. Did you just take these for me? he asked. By your mid-30s, romance is infinite regress. Or infinite repeat. Or just infinite, like Groundhog Day, or samsara. I don’t reuse sexts! I replied. This is romantic. We understand this is romantic. It is, in fact, romantic to take pictures just for him.
One evening when I was fifteen, back in 2009, my ballet teacher arrived at the studio wearing a shit-eating grin. Jeff loved to gossip, and he spoke with a showy Southern twang that made the juice of every secret dribble down our fingers.
The last time I saw George, we were hanging out at the brewery where he worked as bar manager. He and I were perched on stools, like old times, sipping suds and watching the Orlando Magic battle our interstate rivals, the Miami Heat. The stale stench of hops and malts cut in from the beer vats in the back while I told him about Boston: the New England beer scene, the fervent sports fans, the colleges where I taught writing. He shared that things had been going well for him, considering.
When I was about five, I prayed to God as I lay in bed. I prayed for the speed of a cheetah, just like the character I had seen in a cartoon on TV. He could run away from anything.
I just remember the room dense with familiar sound, the melancholy howl of the perfectly in-tune saxophones, the electric brilliance of trumpets, a drummer with eight arms; my mother looking over at me, expectantly, as if to say, “This is what you wanted, right? This is making you happy?”
I just remember the room dense with familiar sound, the melancholy howl of the perfectly in-tune saxophones, the electric brilliance of trumpets, a drummer with eight arms; my mother looking over at me, expectantly, as if to say, “This is what you wanted, right? This is making you happy?”
What will be will be. She was a good swimmer, and at least he was getting some exercise.
I just knew it wasn’t a wolf howling at the moon. I just knew it wasn’t a cow, wasn’t a tree, wasn’t a sunset, wasn’t a child, wasn’t an elder, wasn’t any building I’ve ever built.
Years later I think of the poetry of peeing. The rhythm and alliteration of Russian race horse, the quick dicks and fricatives, the two tree tonals, the rhyme of drain the main vein.
After I threw up in the Mexican restaurant’s normal-sized toilet and picked my stepdaughter up from school, I decided to try my migraine cure that always never works again.
Exposing myself to the dumbest ideas and the most hateful weirdos online triggers a chemical reaction that gives me pleasure, or something like it. A hoarder of bad ideas, stacking them all up into wobbly piles that might someday topple and crush me.
At last our molars burst forth from the gum and we emerged from the rose-colored womb of our first grade classroom.
SOMETIMES WHITE PEOPLE THINK THAT YELLING FACILITATES LANGUAGE ACQUISITION.
Dear ,
I’m sorry that on your birthday you lost all your money gambling while I made $250.
Only 498 words remain. So, let's turn to death.
From the time I was seven until I started taking Seroquel, an anti-psychotic, I had this unending feeling of doom. ‘My go to’, be that of death.
Our waitress bustles around smiling a strangely huge smile for this boring work night. My boyfriend Nick and I don’t follow football and weren’t invited to any parties, and since most Texans are either holding or attending parties the place is pretty deserted. After the waitress brings our waters she follows her normal script and asks if we want to try a signature TGI Fridays drink, but her eyes keep dancing to the bar behind us.
My wife and kids and I are driving around in New Orleans, not too far from where I spent the first... more
I felt as cold and empty as that body lying in that casket lined with fabric smooth and silky white, so different from what usually cradled my grandma’s skin, those soft, oft-washed dresses always topped with a floral apron.
05:05 am. My eyes open. A faint pearly blade of light squeezing past the blind. The distant metallic scrape of a moving tram.
i’ve never attended a wedding and i wasn’t going to start now. my muscles were aching and my jaw was carrying a million bees, terrorizing the sides of my ears and throat.
By the time the keys were in my eager teenaged hand, this car had been through some shit. Even ignoring the holes burned into the driver’s-side door, the missing half of the left side mirror, and the warped, discolored metal down the rest of the vehicle, the car was 13 years old already, and it looked it.
A 400-page collection of poems in fours sections: Nicki Minaj Songs, Bob Dylan Songs, Elliott Smith Songs, and 90s Riot Grrrls Songs.
FOUR NEW ESSAYS BY CHLOE CALDWELL! Plus the original essays that made you fall in love with Chloe!
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.
