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My grandmother had a list of things I couldn’t do. It was not a real list with faded ink on yellowed paper that she pulled out of an old, rusted briefcase, but a directory of interruptions, a bunch of dos and don’ts that, like speed bumps, stopped me from living freely.
The first dead body my son sees is a cat’s. It was in his favorite parking lot. Since the stay-at-home orders were put in place when the pandemic started, we no longer feel safe at Lindale Park, so we come here—the rough asphalt parking lot of St. Luke’s. Stanley enjoys riding his balance bike here, which he got for his third birthday a month ago in June. He’s slow and
You meet a boy that gives you reading assignments, leaf through Candide and Slaughterhouse Five and 1984, biographies of Morrison and Cobain and Clapton. When you scream at each other, it is erotic like climbing up into the rickety deer stand to sit in the torn office chair that rocks back too far. The stands all have names—The Hornet’s Nest, The Apartment, The Hole. You
She puts her eye to the window. It is bulletproof glass, papered over to block the harsh Angeleno sun and hide the iron bars that make the store look like a cage. A haphazard display of posters—frosty bottles of Budweiser, bikinied women, a rakish Joe Camel in sunglasses—but, in the center, a small square gap. Through this she focuses one eye on the man who moments earlier had