i was like ‘no i’m fine i don’t care’ and they both shrugged and did the coke while i finished closing the store by myself, it was like mad annoying but i didn’t really want to use the coke, i never really liked it anyways and honestly the last time i did coke with cloyster i think it was straight up all filler i didn’t feel that shit at all…. oh yeah and i’m uhhhh, 3 months sober… Continue Reading
Pick a goddamn fish, you’re holding up the line. Just buy whatever’s cheapest. Watch the fishmonger crunch the fish from the ice and plop it on the board to filet. When he asks if he should “bone it,” go ahead and laugh, but say, “No.” Where will you be if you don’t learn to bone a fish? … Continue Reading
Pop handled the calving season better than anyone. He claimed he could smell the fertility in the air, that the scent clung to him like pollen. Each year, the neighbors sought him out as if he were an augur, and he predicted each of their cows’ labors with shocking accuracy.… Continue Reading
Being a fresh transplant from California I wanted to see the state, so I took the blue road route meandering through mile after mile of woods, dead and dying farms, and based on the epidemiological data, dozens of tiny one-street oxy towns and heroin hollers.… Continue Reading
While everyone else belly laughs at the hullabaloo, and as your father chain smokes another pall mall, you hear his silver lighter flick open and closed, the sharp metallic clank of metal against metal booms over the commotion.… Continue Reading
We sit silently awhile, Grant adjusting to having company while I drink my coffee. Other Grants–fake fakes–crowd the door, a half-dozen or more, each well-burnished and impeccably bar-lit, shining like Christmas toys, all backslaps and whiskey breath and haughty wheezing, toasting Galena’s Memorial Day Gold Star Ceremony with platitudes and here-here’s. None of them so much as side-eye Grant at the lowboy, a ghost among ghosts.… Continue Reading
When I ask Danny what the poster means he says it’s like all the other stupid school posters and they all mean the same thing. “But what is it?” I ask. “Don’t do drugs,” Danny says.… Continue Reading
It was his taxi where he got stuck daily in crosstown traffic that sent him exploding with rage. This was the taxi where he was once held up at gunpoint and this was the taxi where he took naps during slow afternoons. This was the taxi whose seats he scrubbed with bleach and this was the taxi in which he picked us up from our mother’s house and drove us to school, home from basketball practice, and came to get us in, always, when we needed him.… Continue Reading
The world is ending and I came to this baseball game because, I mean, what else was there to do? Sit in my apartment alone and scroll through Twitter—excuse me, X—reading about the imminent asteroid impact? No thank you.… Continue Reading
She suddenly recalls watching a TV show where a group of Asian men dropped tiny, wriggling octopuses into their open mouths like how the Romans ate grapes. Then, the men swallowed the octopuses whole.… Continue Reading