A match, half a bottle of liquor, a full can of gasoline, a house covered in cheap carpeting, with ancient, oh-so-flammable wooden furniture in every single room…
Magazine
A Brief History of the Soft Drink
Behind the convenience store, beyond the dumpster, a path begins so narrow it explains how it has been walked only single-file by the brain-damaged who travel daily to the store from the state-sponsored school for the impaired. Those residents have etched a permanent...
Halcyon Digest
“Nothing is as good as you remember it being. We digest, compile, and collate our memories to be more agreeable to us. We leave out the bad parts.”—Bradford Cox 1. Earthquake Julien and I spent the summer huddled over my kitchen table emailing bookers, calculating...
Errands
When the apocalypse comes, I’ll write my grocery lists in ash on the fallout shelter walls. I didn’t mean to say ash. I meant to say something more forgivable, something held fragilely like an antique phrase, like spring’s tides of marigold, something to be replaced...
A Girl Grows Wings
At first, her feathers are pale gray. Baby wings, they span seven inches and flutter eagerly to the touch. In time, they turn robin’s egg blue, stretching toward the easy insides of her elbows. Her skin is very tender then, like a freshly healed wound, and when her...
Yo-Yo Personality Quiz: Who’s in the Driver’s Seat Today?
This quiz will identify which self is dominant today—Is it the All-Knowing, Pessimist, Obsessive, True Potential or Authentic Self? Choose the response that most resonates. Yo-Yo is a wooden toy that hardly interested you when time was for the taking. Now, you wish...
Beltane Queen
“Don’t tell me about your life,” your sister says, shutting the door in your face. “Okay, sorry for existing,” you reply, grumbling down the stairs....
Distancing
My husband lost his job at the airport, in this Colorado mountain town of 6,500, because the last flight he worked for United had a single passenger. All the stores and restaurants are closed, all nonessential businesses, so he applied for a job at the hospital as a...
O Night Divine; Take it Like a Man
O Night Divine Straight-shot past sunset—no tolls, no gas, no pissing, camels for two hours with the kids asleep to talk about our life until the 10-year-old wakes, insists on Christmas music. It’s Nov. 26th, but we find it more easily than we avoid weaving...
Dogs
Listen: Your life will be different than you thought. There will be one night where you will wake up, outside, in the middle of the night, peeing into your underwear, underneath a gazebo in the middle of a dark compound in the outskirts of Kampala, Uganda; a compound...