Hey Hermanote, So, Grandma ran away from home today. Well, technically, she ran away a few days ago but I found out today when Black-Girl-Named-Becky answered Grandma’s phone and told me. (What’s weird about Black-Girl-Named-Becky is that she actually sounds like a black girl
They say you’re supposed to piss yourself if someone dips your hand in warm water while you sleep. I was never totally sure who they were exactly—scientists, probably, yet the instructional charts and graphs they could have provided must have eluded the other boys
1 Since my sister, Erica, and her husband, Jeremy, had moved to Dallas as newlyweds, Erica had precious few opportunities to teach me everything I needed to know about young adulthood. “Everything I needed to know” consisted of religion instruction—which Erica didn’t trust my parents
On average, the adult human skeleton is composed of 206 bones weighing 30-40 % of the body’s total weight. Water accounts for half that figure. Desiccated, then, the skeleton weighs 15-20% of a body’s original weight at death. So if my father weighed 170
It begins with something sharp, a smell forced up my nose and down my throat. A vision flashes, just a snap of memory, so vivid I feel its edges: I am back in St. Louis, running my pre-adolescent fingers through freshly cut grass; in Mesa,
I understood—instinctively, if not denotatively—the word ethereal before I stumbled across its definition during junior-year SAT prep. Ethereal: extremely delicate and light in a way that seems too perfect for this world. Ethereal: it’s the silver ribbon of sound that threads the air when Elise
The love letters awaited me in the thin aluminum box of apartment #2 at the Idalia, a brick, pre-WWII apartment building spangled with ivy. I’d ridden the city bus home from my university. The Ninja woman was on my bus that day. My ex-boyfriend called
I ordered food I could not eat. I sat across from him and thought I might throw up or pass out and either way the bathroom was probably the best place to be. Not in the booth of the greasy hipster diner, its cushions partially
Ponca wasn’t saved. The thought sat like a weight on my chest. Grandma didn’t attend church either, but Mom insisted her mother believed; Ponca, my grandpa, was another story. He was a wayward soul – someone we prayed for earnestly as if faith was something
There was a house at the bottom of a hill by the shore. It was coated in a clotted-cream-colored siding perpetually speckled with dirt. A sturdy oak sat in the back yard, centered between the off-white vinyl fence and a deck only big enough to