After you accept that no one can uphold competing, contradictory gender mandates, you can do whatever you goddamn want.… Continue Reading
After you accept that no one can uphold competing, contradictory gender mandates, you can do whatever you goddamn want.… Continue Reading
Bev is singing Karen Carpenter songs. She’s getting that thin. Her voice steals across the sand to me. From the cottage. She’s making love with Mike. I’m on the lake beach watching their two kids sink ankle deep, knee deep, hip deep until I snatch them out. I roll them and sand sticks to them like I intend to fry them up. Maybe I will.… Continue Reading
A mad woman doesn’t know what she is doing or thinking, I know, so don’t bracket me, I hissed. I don’t open my mouth because it has the garbage of the world that the oceans have left behind, the kind that can choke blue whales and leave them on the shores like impossible spectacles.… Continue Reading
I think of my less than $200. From that, I subtract my half of the rent. And from that, I subtract the cost of my misery, of the sense my times about to run out, that everything I was supposed to become is slipping away. Every subtraction pushes me further into the negative, deeper into a spiraling surplus of regret.… Continue Reading
When you see two people fucking, with a capital F—really sharing the spoils the way it should be—who cares if the Company has gathered at three o’clock on a Monday to hear the top dog give his all-hands spiel? You look, godammit, and you probably laugh. That’s the human thing to do.… Continue Reading
She felt like she’d been folded up and stuck inside herself like a piece of origami. Like she was an empty shell, inhabiting someone else’s body the Earth, and attempting to exist like a normal human. Maybe she’d lost her autonomy. Maybe an alien had taken over her body and she didn’t realize it until now but it was too late to regain control.… Continue Reading
It was embarrassing, sprinting in his shiny funeral suit, trailing the paper kite over the hillocks. And from this he gained some sense of the ridiculous and the infantile that fathers persevered through for little-ones too young to recognise it as anything other than wondrous.… Continue Reading
Mark smells the shit before he sees it. Mrs. Friedman is naked on the beige carpet, leaning on her loveseat covered in flowered upholstery, her silver hair staining red. She is holding a dirty diaper in her hand. “What were you doing out of bed, Mrs. Friedman? Looking for a midnight snack?” “It’s none of your fucking business.”… Continue Reading
How does one become a zombie? Hmm. All of us have unique stories, but one way or another, we end up losing our homes and possessions, so we take to the streets. Street life is hard. Some zombies get better, their situations reverse, but most of us keep getting worse. Our memories fade, speech gets slurred. It’s a common story, really. There are more of us around than you think.… Continue Reading
He called out sexism and misogyny everywhere; occasionally even in his own family. Once, he stunned his mother by explaining how she had been the victim of domestic abuse. “You don’t understand,” he told her. “Father manipulated you into thinking you wanted to stay home. That was his way of keeping you under control. He was a textbook emotional abuser.”… Continue Reading