All of the bedroom was suffering / with his eyes full of wings.

Waitresses circled the room like vultures. Sometimes I dreamt of laying down on the hot sand, my spine fusing to it, nerves sizzling, going blind from the light, my chest cavity ripped open while they pecked around my ribs—the waitresses, I mean—for whatever they could salvage, whatever was still good.

I was ten when my mother first took me to a psychiatrist. He put me on Zoloft at her request. My relationship with pharmaceuticals is my longest running one to date. My normal.

So I guess I’m an animal then, aren’t I? Why? Why was I born?

I, and my vile habit represented a toxic threat both materially and existentially. It wasn’t only the danger of secondhand smoke, but the mere existence of smoking that they wished to shield from their cherub.

Chris snaps the seal of a Jack Daniels shooter and pops the brown sugar down his throat. Tommy pops Vicodin: Coronado eats a stick of dynamite and blasts his brain with meth, no judgement.

She sits in the grass in her special place and she does her meditation. It is the place she has carved out for herself in the world. 

I haven’t had a sip of water in days. I scan the colorful, exotic flowers that fill the twenty eighth floor apartment. The view overlooks the Hudson River in New York City, and the lazy, muddy water

Relentless torrents of rain poured down that whole night, gently lulling me to sleep.

I could hear the usual blues music booming from Ryan’s garage as I got off my bike in the driveway, sweating through my Smoothie King uniform. Ryan’s dad had started and quit three blues bands in the

So what if I can’t cook? I can clean a crime scene then let you hate-fuck me after.

Chronic illness already made dating hard. And then the pandemic arrived.

“I almost forgot—” my childhood friend interjected as we were wrapping up a phone call on a blustery September day. “I

I keep trying not to say, I think about you all the time, I want to come for you, and I hang up without saying it, and then I call you later from my bed and I end up saying it all anyway.

this Christmas

this Christmas i realized
i don’t have a family
i have familiar strangers
i can drink beers with
forget myself with
but not family

ever since I remembered
my mother tried to

What I mean is I write auto-biographical fiction and as such I’m a habitual and unrepentant liar-liar-pants-on-fire sheep in wolf’s clothing.

Swallowing those pills at night was now like playing Russian roulette; the blues were, for the first time in many years, the leading cause of drug deaths in Scotland, overtaking even heroin.

Once, I thought I would forgive. Now, a year later, I’m still waiting for the feeling to appear

No, I do not want any kind of modern love, with all its entitlements,

Nipple covers.

Pasties come in every shape, size and color. They can be plain or blinged within an inch of their minuscule lives. They can have tassels attached. They go on one’s butt cheeks with

i made my mom a swear jar 
and am using the money to buy filet o fish.

Full facial tattoo or painlessly losing your lips. One has to happen. What is it going to be? What’s that facial tattoo going to be? How’re you going to face the world without those lips?

You asked Harrison who sat opposite you, if Mexico was a strong team and all he said was they might upset Argentina. He said this in reference to their game against Saudi-Arabia, you no see wetin them play against those Arab men the other day? Your hope dashed. You became a piece of meat doused with anxiety.

I have known / a hunger I would undo / my own good birth to sate
 

Between long sucks of her Newport, Jessalyn told me she was still so angry at her best friend for missing her wedding that she’d mailed her a box of crickets.

Crickets? I said.

Dead crickets.

What interested me about those stories didn’t really matter to you anyway.

Rebecca K. Reilly’s debut novel Greta & Valdin was a bestseller in her home country of New Zealand in 2021, and today it’s being released in the US and the UK. Pitched as Schitt’s Creek meets