Maybe you can do this. It’s not your idea. But maybe.

I’d learned from Rock of Love that a diabetic’s rollercoaster blood sugar is a constant interruptor at best.

In the middle of the night in the second week after Dad’s passing, my phone lights up and it’s twin, it’s sister. 

“Hello?”

“I want to... more

I was the only person in my family this level of depravity happened to.

I followed him up the stairs up to his apartment and once inside he made parachutes, wrapping loose MDMA in tissue paper.

No cheating; you've got to keep your fingers touching my fingers. Good. Remember to keep your hands flat. Flat and steady and ready.

When I broke up with you, I thought you might kill me, and somehow, I was bored.

my mother once told me, grief gives your body the shakes.

Xenia and I had been cheating on each other with the same woman for about three months

You will read my restrained but subtly brutal birth story and finally recognize that we who give birth are dauntless soldiers returning to the fight and we are also the old men ignoring the bombs because we have animals at home we love too much to go on and we have never felt more alive than we do right now.

This new doctor smiles as he enters the room, as if we’re sharing a joke though we’ve never met before. “Tell me,” he says, “how many people get your name right on the first try?”

Like if I were at this apartment in 2009 I’d be talking to some guy with scraggly teeth and pockmarked skin and a hoodie but he’d also be like, unconventionally handsome, but you could tell the last time he talked to his mom he said some fucked up shit and probably beat up his siblings growing up, and I’d be thinking ‘this seems like…my only option…’ 

People I Don’t _______ to anymore. This is a prompt inspired by Chelsea Hodson’s essay, People I Don’t Talk To Anymore.

Being sleep deprived while in quarantine is like living in this dream I had a few days ago where I died but didn’t lose consciousness and for the rest of the dream I floated over a muddy creek with no ability to interact with the world in any way.

I remember the next morning, puking, shaking violently, asking for God’s mercy. There was too much light coming through the blinds. I was a living, breathing version of “Hurt.” 

I didn’t have headphones for my CD player, so when my parents were home I kept the volume low. At night when they went to bed I played it at a barely audible level and hugged the machine against my ear.

This boy wants a cat for the idea of a cat. Real responsibility chokes him. This boy wants to embody the... more

This is our second time playing but he’s still constantly clarifying, correcting. The game, this one or the real one, has strict rules. You can’t fuck it up. You need to understand every instruction, every play, need to speak the language, know the abbreviations.

When I was nine my grandfather taped every episode of Ken Burns’s Baseball and mailed me the VHS tapes from Kansas City.... more

Usually when my parents went off to lead one of these weekend retreats, they’d leave all four of us kids to stay at the same place, usually with another retreat family, sometimes even people we already knew.

At the end of the 90s, the MLB’s closest analogue was the WWF.

The helmet is slightly too big, and the interior foam padding is the texture of damp dough, thanks to Paula’s fat, sweaty head.

At first I thought he meant food, but he never asked what I wanted.

This will not work.

“How ‘bout it, Ronnie. Throw something Butch can hit. Try over the plate for once.”