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The Best
Alt Lit
Short
Stories
2012



LIFE-AFFIRMING STORIES BY:
Ben Brooks Sam Pink Frank Hinton Richard Chiem
Frances Dinger Lucy K Shaw Lily Dawn Spencer Madsen
Michael Inscoe Guillaume Morissette Megan Boyle Noah Cicero
Timothy Willis Sanders xTx Justin Carter Matthew Donahoo

WITH A FOREWORD BY:
Beach Sloth
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Contents

Foreword Why We Alt Lit 05
by Beach Sloth

01. Avital by Noah Cicero 06
from (Short) Fiction Collective

02. Id be a Barbie Without Him by Frank Hinton 08
from Housefire

03. Juliana by Sam Pink 11
from Hurt Others (Lazy Fascist, 2012)

04. Vaster Emptiness Achieved by Guillaume Morissette 20
from I Am My Own Betrayal (Maison Kasini, 2012)

05. I am Sitting on an Air Mattress Reading Lorrie Moore
Short Stories as You Fall Asleep by Justin Carter 32
from Have U Seen My Whale #2

06. A Firsthand Account of 72 hours of Intervention by Lily Dawn 39
from lilyyydawn.blogspot.ca

07. Karen, the Most Well Endowed Among Us by Frances Dinger 51
from Small Doggies Magazine

08. How to Survive a Car Accident by Richard Chiem 54
from You Private Person (Scrambler, 2012) & Thought Catalog

09. The Day No One Died by Spencer Madsen 58
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from Gmail

10. Okay by Matthew Donahoo 60
from Gmail

11. The Mill Pond by xTx 65
from StoryGlossia

12. If I Could Be Sweet by Lucy K Shaw 71
from ThoughtCatalog

13. Sweet Potatoes by Timothy Willis Sanders 78
from Orange Juice (Awesome Machine, 2010-2012)

14. I Remember Waking Up and Kissing You, My Lips Sticky from
Sleep, on a Floor Covered with Other Twenty-Somethings,
a DVD Menu Looping Over and Over on the Television, Getting
Up Early and Driving 30 Minutes to Work by Michael Inscoe 84
from Metazen

15. We Arent Really Supposed To Talk To Bears by Ben Brooks 88
from Pop Serial #3

16. Embarassing Moments by Megan Boyle 93
from Muumuu House

List of Twitter accounts 97



5

A Foreword Why We Alt Lit
by Beach Sloth

I wonder about the importance of alt lit. Sure it is small but theres an extreme form of
interconnectedness I adore. Right around when I discovered alt lit I was going through
various questions about where my own life was headed. Art galleries did not inspire me.
There, artists said If you do your job long enough, it will define you. Once they said that I
panicked. A paycheck is one thing. Meaning is entirely different. Where could I even find a
culture that welcomed me? At this point I only wrote about music and things I thought I
knew.
Literature appealed to me. Who was the first alt lit person to follow me? After I wrote a
particularly silly review of Richard Yates by Tao Lin, I got a new twitter follower, some guy
from Chicago named Steve Roggenbuck. He seemed nice enough, although what he usually
shared was different from what I normally read on a day to day basis.
Others began to appear. As I got more into what Steve did, I realized that other people
were attached to this strange scene as well. I thought these people are making these things
because they enjoy it rather than for any financial gain. Art shared on the internet wasnt
some brand new concept to me but the tight-knit community was appealing.
At first I wanted to hedge my bets and wrote about alt lit only on Sundays. Eventually
I realized this was a community I wanted to engage with, to perhaps be friends with.
Nothing was happening in my day to day life. Work happened. School happened. I met new
friends. Yet the alt lit scene possessed a certain hope. Even among the most depressed or
seems bleak writers, there was a certain hope that I hadnt seen for a long, long time.
People began to approach me, which was good as Im bad at approaching people. Love the
friendliness of alt lit.
What makes it liberating for me is the range of emotions, the outright passion and care
I see in alt lit writers. A few of them have told me I spend more time on this than I do at my
own job. For eight hours in a place it one thing, anyone can do a job on autopilot for a few
hours. To see these pieces, these writers, I know something great is happening. Every piece
of alt lit I read adds a little bit to my life. Having interacted with these writers online, read
their chapbooks, even met them IRL, I know this is big wonderful thing Im glad I joined.
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01.
Avital
by Noah Cicero


Avital said, So I spent last weekend in my room. I couldn't handle going to school again.
The idea was too oppressing. While she spoke her face was animated, her arms were
flapping, there was such feeling in her voice, she continued, I couldn't take it. The whole
world, maybe the universe, I kept asking God why, why God, why high school? I took some
sleeping pills and went to sleep when I woke up Saturday morning, I went to sleep. The sleep
felt so good, so nice and good and clean. So much cleaner than anything this world offers. I
want to feel clean, you know, clean. I am not clean. I woke up around 3 and ate a bowl of
cereal and some fruit. The fruit tasted good, it was, I think strawberries from the garden, so
they were like, you know fresh. Then Eric called me on the phone, and I was like, I have to go
over. You know. He said he had money and I need pills, I like pills, I have no money, I had to
get money from somebody. So I went to Eric's. He was horrible. We went into his bedroom,
his parents weren't there. We had sex, he gave me 30 dollars. I don't know why he gives me
money. I don't even know why I had sex with him. Before I left he told me, 'Don't tell anyone
about this.' Then he punched me in the stomach. I didn't mind, I've been punched in the
stomach before. I went home and took another sleeping pill. I needed sleep. Nothing
mattered. I needed to get away. I went in my house, my dad was there, and he was like
sitting there reading a book, my mother told me about how the church was having a
fundraiser the next day for somebody I didn't know, that I needed to go and eat pancakes. I
didn't want to eat pancakes. I went in my bedroom, listened to Fleetwood Mac, I sat next to
the speakers, and just listened, I kept thinking that something good would happen if I just
laid there long enough, I remembered I had a Darvocet. The Darvocet made me feel better.
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That reminds me I need to get some pills. Then I finally went to sleep. I fell asleep right on
the floor. I woke up wearing my shoes. I was so fucked up; I forgot to take them off. I didn't
know where I was. My mother came bursting in the door, she yelled at me to get up, that we
needed to go to church. I went, I went to fucking church. Oh man, there were people
everywhere, there was pancakes and sausages everywhere. There were a lot of old people
there. The old men kept gawking at me and my newly formed breasts. It was devastating.
Then after the pancake dinner I went to Jim's house down the street, he sold me some
Vicodin. I took the Vicodin and tried walking down the street, I felt too weird and fucked up
to walk. I walked into the woods and laid on the ground. I watched the squirrels and birds
for like two hours. I just sat there; it was great, nobody bitching at me to do something like
go to a fucking pancake breakfast. I moved so little, that a squirrel came within five feet of
me. I stared at the squirrel and said, 'Hi, little squirrel.' The squirrel didn't move. Eventually
the squirrel left. I was so fucked up. Then I finally got up, it took everything I had to get up
and leave that woods. I thought I might have died. But then I realized I could still move. I
moved, I could still move my body, my body moved. I walked home. My mother told me that
I needed to get a good nights sleep so I could be fresh for school when I got up in the
morning. I went to my bedroom and cut myself for a while. My thighs looks terrible. Oh god,
why am I alive?
We all sat stood there listening to her. She talked like that constantly, she would start
something and she would go through every little detail of the story. Ryan passed around a
bowl and we all took turns smoking.


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02.
Id be a Barbie Without Him
by Frank Hinton

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We were in the playroom. I had Legos and Barbies everywhere. Ryan and I started to wrestle.
He pinned me to the ground and I felt something hard in his pants.
What is that?
My thing.
I saw it then, like a little thumb beneath his jogging pants. Without asking he pulled it
out and I looked at it and realized Id just lost something but I couldnt think of what. I was
amazed.

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Frank and I were playing Chrono Trigger on SNES. He said he had figured out how to time-
attack it and beat the game in under 16:00. I was impressed, I think. I had just learned the
controls of Chrono Trigger.
Frank killed the last boss in 15:00 and we watched the ending and we watched as
credits rolled. All kinds of Japanese names slid up the screen in 16 bit font. Frank tilted to
me and turned his head and tried to kiss me. I saw his face coming and thought for a
moment that it would be fine to kiss him and then in another, more powerful moment, I saw
him as a repulsive, oily skinned creature that was beyond untouchable. I recoiled. Frank
dropped the controller and smiled some crooked thing and crawled onto me as I pulled
away.
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"This is probably a bad idea.
Frank's breath smelled like vanilla frozen yogurt which was kind of all right. He came
in again and this time I closed my eyes and risked being eaten by a monster. His lips clamped
onto my bottom lip and I stiffened. Then his tongue came forth and wet my bottom lip. I
relaxed at the warmth and when the lip part of me relaxed the mouth part of me relaxed
and then my entire face relaxed. I opened my mouth for his tongue and brought it in to
perform a kind of Sea World whale-act. Frank slid his body up and fully onto mine. I didn't
hear the wooden floor creaking and I didn't hear the Chrono Trigger ending music.
Everything worked.

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I cut you a paper flower out of a large piece of red paper. I made my cuts in a long, single
spiral and rolled the spiral up until it formed the shape of a rose and I taped it and affixed
the spiral rose to a sliver of green paper and I gave you all of that. You smiled at me when
you took the paper and you didnt react the way I wanted you to react. I wanted you to think
about it real hard. I wanted you to see the process I put into the rose, not the result. You
thought it was a shoddy, childish craft. I found it in your sock door, to the left, with the
loosies.

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We all had pet rocks at our school. We didnt have marbles or Pogs we just had pet rocks.
Every girl would pick which boy she wanted to have a pet rock with. All of the pretty little
cunts politiced their way into a pet rock family with the most desirable boys. I was stuck
with Glenn. Glenn was popular and funny but he had the kind of overbite that makes one
resemble a horse. Our pet rock was named Metroid. It was green. We pretended to be good
parents but Glenn and I fought constantly. He wanted to hold hands and I couldnt do it. One
weekend when it was my turn to take Metroid home I dropped the little green rock in the
river on the way to piano practice. I hated that rock more than Glenn.

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10


I was drunk and the guy shaped me on the bed. I felt like a puzzle being taken apart. He
asked me to suck on his tongue instead of kiss. He asked me to lock my joints. Im like
furniture, I thought. It wasnt so bad. The way he broke me wasnt so bad.

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I was promised a dream. Frank told me we would lie under soft silk quilts and undulate in a
mixed glow of lantern and moonlight. It was supposed to be warm and safe and slow. Instead
I got the sound of rain on a tin roof falling like stones above me. There was no pace to him.
Frank entered full of fear and I felt a ripping and the room got so cold I shivered the entire
time. I was so happy for it to be over. I was happy to be left. We were in a shitty south shore
cottage. Everything smelled of sea.

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I went to the river and pulled out Metroid. Some specs of green remained. His little sad eyes
had been weathered away. I got stoned and took the rock to Glenns house and he answered
the door and I laughed when I saw him but Glenn didnt laugh.
Who are you?
I told him I had the wrong house and I put Metroid back in the water.

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I saw my friends parents fucking. I knew I was going to be alright.

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You have hurt me more than anything. I will take you back no matter what. You could hit
me in the face and I would take it. You could sleep with my best friend and I would forget it.
You cant break me. You can have me over and over until forever.
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03.
Juliana
by Sam Pink

For a few weeks last year I had a job as a nanny for a rich family in Chicago.
My friend was a nanny and did babysitting work at hotels and this one family asked
her to become their nanny but she couldn't so she asked if i wanted the job.
I said yes.

I'd worked with kids before.
I used to work at a daycare.
I was the "nap assistant."
That meant I watched a room with 10 to 20 kids in itsupposed to be nappingwhile
the teachers got lunch and had meetings.
The kids were between the ages of three and six.
I helped them get their cots arranged and then I watched over them, maintaining
order.
Maintaining order meant reading them books, whispering their names from across the
room and motioning for them to stop talking and go to sleep, preparing the snacktime food,
talking to kids about things to keep them from doing something else that would wake kids
up, reading the same book over again, denying attempts by girls to become their boyfriends,
sitting by potential loud/misbehaving kids as a source of discouragement, agreeing to play
soccer or other sports at recess, agreeing to play legos after naptime, agreeing to sit next to
someone at snacktime, and helping outside at recess and doing anything else until the end
of the day when parents came.
This one Chinese kid named Hardy always came up to me at naptime, with a ring of dry
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snot in his nostril.
He'd pinch his genitals and look sideways and say something like, "I like fruit punch
and tacos."
Hardy was really cool.
He always behaved.
I think he only got upset one time (because he missed his mom) and cried a little bit
and then was embarrassed about it.
Other than that, Hardy was cool.
Whenever I asked him why he didn't do something he was supposed to do, he'd say,
"Want to know something" then he'd make shit up to keep me from talking.
Some of Hardy's jokes were pretty good too.
Most of his material involved "wieners," but I could sense he was expanding.
There were a lot of kids.
There was this girl named Ariel.
She made me promise to be her boyfriend "before maria"if I decided to have a
girlfriend.
I said, "I'll pick you as my girlfriend first if I decide to have one."
There was a very tiny girl named Aruj and she always slept the entire nap time.
Every day she slept the whole time.
And every time she woke up she'd either cry or shake her finger at me and say, "Vutt is
so funny, mister."
I had to carry her a lot.
Felt like I had her in one arm a lot and would just forget about her.
Other things I did were
I cut up apples.
I drew a lot of Spiderman masks.
I did legos.
I tied shoes.
I supervised games of tag and often dominated them at recess. (Having longer legs and
arms.)
I talked about dinosaurs.
I explained why you couldn't act a certain way to another kid because of how you had
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to respect other people.
I addressed questions on the day a bird flew into the recess door and lay there bleeding
and dying on the sidewalk by the fire exit, while we all watched.
I addressed questions about superheros and things about their powers that didn't
make sense to them.
I just made shit up a lot of the time, because kids believe anything you tell them as
long as you don't laugh while saying it.
I watched butterflies hatch for a science experiment.
I helped trace kids so they could draw themselves on large pieces of paper and hang
them up for Parent Night.
I made paper airplanes.
I went to museums.
I held hands.
I pushed up to four people on swings at the same time.
I made seven dollars an hour, which seemed like a lot.
When kids actually slept during nap time, I read books myself.
I read a book about World War Two and a death march and how when one prisoner in
the march, like, did something wrong or fell down, a guy from the Japanese military swung
his sword down into the prisoner's head and the sword went from the top of the prisoner's
skull, all the way down into his neck.
Sometimes instead of reading I just drew pictures on pieces of construction paper lying
around and then gave them to whoever wanted them when everyone woke up.
Every day at the job I felt angry and annoyed and then at the end the kids all said bye
to me at the same time and/or tried to hug my leg to keep me from leaving and I felt dumb
for getting mad.
No actually I was still mad.
It was summer and I was living in a studio apartment near Little Italy.
At night when it was too hot to sleep I'd shadowbox until I sweated a lot and felt tired
enough to sleep.
The mirrored sliding door to my closet had streaks of sweat all over it, from months
and months.
Or I had this old soccer ball that I would kick against the wall by the Christopher
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Columbus statue across the street.
I got thin and hardened.
I was ready for things no one had even heard of.
Ready for things that would never happen.
It was a very calm summer of realizing I didn't want anything, and there were good
reasons.

The nanny job paid thirteen dollars an hour, cash.
I only got the job because my friend told the family about my daycare work and she
also made up some shit about how long she'd known me.
The family invited me to dinner.
Their apartment was in the downtown area of Chicago and overlooked the lake.
Their apartment had people working in the office area on the main floor.
It had electronic keycard access.
So fucking awesome it made me lose hope in everything.
The parents were from Ohio.
The husband said common political shit about needing to stop immigration, hating
Barack Obama, and he also made jokes that centered on homosexuality as the funny part.
The wife was from Ohio too and she was really nice.
Their daughter's name was Juliana and she was overweight.
At dinner, the mom said, "So basically, the job is just picking her up from school and
doing her homework with her and playing with her until I get back from doing my campaign
work. She's a little brat but she can be good."
"Yeah she's a little something," the husband said. "You like football man? You a Bears
fan I guess? Probably a Bears fan yeah?"
I ate some of the lamb they made.
I had a brief vision of me and the wife, sitting naked in a field, with our hands on the
back of a lamb, me and the wife looking at each other.
"I don't like football," I said.
"What do you like," the husband said.
"I like boxing."
He said, "No one watches boxing anymore."
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The mom continued, "And um, she can bathe herself." She laughed and put some hair
behind her ear. "Please, don't bathe my child. Also, you don't have to clean the apartment or
anything."
"I can do that if you want," I said.
Both parents looked at me.
They thought I meant, "I can bathe your child if you want" but I was referring to
cleaning the apartment. "Cleaning the apartment," I said.
They seemed upset.
The mom said, "Why don't you and Juliana play in her room for a little bit."
I said, "Ok. Dinner was good. Thank you."
"Spank you," the husband said, looking off somewhere, before getting up.
Juliana and I went to her room and we played with a huge dollhouse.
I was given a doll.
I was told what to do.
I did what i was told.
The dollhouse was big and we played an extremely vague game with the dolls that
involved a lot of walking around and not understanding what was going on.
It was fun though.
Then at one point Juliana smiled and said, "What about this" and she made her doll
shit and then eat it, saying something like, "Chup chup chup"laughing.
"I don't know," I said, laughing.
Then she was laughing hard, almost without sound, her eyes watering.
"Chup chup chup." She made the doll shit again and then eat it and then she rolled her
eyes all around and said, "Mm mm, I love it."
I was laughing.
I said, "Man."
Then the game with the dolls transitioned into making the dolls jump off the roof of
the dollhouse and hit the carpet and die.
The mom told me it'd be a regular thing with regular pay but it turned out only me
being on call for whenever they wanted to leave the apartment.
Which turned out to be barely at all.
It was bullshit.
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Almost two months, a day or two each week.
Like, seven visits total.
Picking Juliana up from school was weird because it was a bunch of middle-aged
women waiting for their children and then me, a big dumbass with a shaved-head, looking
tired.
On the walks home from school, Juliana would tell me about her classmates and about
toys she wanted.
I would ask her questions about the toys.
Like, "Why do you want that toy."
Or, "Why is it good that the toy does that."
When she finally noticed it was a regular thing I did, she stopped explaining anything
and would just say, "Stahopp, I'm trying to tell you."
At home I helped her with homework.
It was easy.
I knew all the answers immediately.
We traced letters and colored pictures at the dinner table, overlooking the entire
skyline of the city and the lake.
All of Chicago opened up, even the factories along the outside, the traintracks,
highways, Chicago River, Sears Tower, State Street, everything.
I'd look out into the skyline and feel good feelings, even though there was nothing to
feel good about.
"I handed out invitations for my birthday party today at school and i didn't give one to
stupid Larry," she said, tracing over her vocabulary words.
She bit a grilled cheese sandwich I'd made her.
She said, "I hate Larry, he's so gross."
"Why is Larry gross," I said, putting my legs up on another kitchen chair.
"He always has boogers in his nose and he pinches everyone. He's stupid. Larry is so
stupid."
"So he's not coming to your birthday party," I said, checking over a packet of
homework her teacher had returned graded. "I see a lot of stickers here, good job."
"Um, yeah thanks," she said, still trying to stay mad.
"No he's not coming because he's retarded."
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"Larry is retarded."
"Yeah I hate him. Charmene is coming and I told her to buy me a Littlest Pet Shop toy.
It's a squirrel named Rodney and I don't have him yet but I want him."
"Rodney is a squirrel."
"Yeah he's insane."
"Wait is Rodney a person coming to your birthday party or a squirrel."
"Stah-opp, Rodney is the squirrel. My mom said you can come too if you want."
"I can come to your birthday party. Thanks. I can probably make it."
"Yeah, we're getting pizza and cake."
I leaned forward and said, "You're going to have pizza and cake there" then I made a
fist and punched upward into the air and yelled, "yes."
"Yeah."
"What is 'Littlest Pet Shop,'" I said.
"Here, let's go play."
She closed her book and put it in a folder and put three more stickers on the folder.
Then we went to her room.
She took out a plastic case.
She opened the case and inside there were a lot of small plastic animals.
I looked at a picture of her and her dad in a frame by her bed.
It scared me.
Turned my shit to stone.
No I'm lying, I didn't react much at all.
Juliana got on her knees and sat on her heels, dividing the toys.
I got to be a rhino and I made up a voice for it that Juliana really liked.
She kept laughing.
Which meant I had to keep doing it.
In the few times I visited, we played Littlest Pet Shop, dolls, "camera woman" (where I
acted like a cameraman filming her doing the news), cards, and legos.
We colored in coloring books, painted, looked at toys on the internet and ate together.
Sometimes the dad would be there, sleeping in his room because he worked at night.
Sometimes he'd wake up and come out of his room to the kitchen, where I'd be cooking
a grilled cheese and quizzing Juliana in math.
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It felt weird.
Working for the family added to my general feeling that everyone I encountered (for
good reason) didn't like me.
It was ok.
Juliana and I went on walks.
I took her to a playground once and we kept putting snow on the slide and then sliding
down the slide really fast.
At night, Juliana would be in bed and I'd just sit at the dinner table and look out the
windowsfrom the twentieth floorout at the entire city.

The last time I ever worked for them, I took Juliana to the Chicago Field Museum.
We saw an exhibit called "Underground."
The exhibit was enlarged displays of insects and things that lived underground.
Juliana held my hand the whole time and we walked through a "shrink ray" which was
just an optical illusion where you go into this room and can watch yourself on the screen,
shrinking in order to go "underground."
"Are we really shrinking," she said, looking at me.
"Yeah we're really shrinking."
"No we're not," she said.
"It felt like I was shrinking," I said, looking at my hands.
"Me too," she said.
We walked through a dark tunnel into the exhibit.
There were field trips, little kids with a few teachers/moms.
There were kids in wheelchairs.
"How old are you," Juliana said.
We were looking at a diagram of dirt from the Midwest.
"I'm 26."
"Are you married," she said.
"No."
"Do you have kids."
"No."
"You don't have any kids," she said.
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"No wait, yeah. I had a kid and then I lost him after he walked through a shrink ray and
wouldn't hold my hand."
"No you didn't," she said. "Do you have a girlfriend."
"No."
"Why not."
"Shrink ray," I said.
We looked at a diagram of how other things become dirt and then that dirt makes
other things.
We walked through a tunnel of dirt, where it was supposed to be like we were in the
root system of a tree.
We stopped and stood by a display of huge plastic parts meant to look like a burrow
and some kind of insect that was motorized with an opening and closing jaw.
Then a hissing sound happened.
A big spider came out from behind a tree-root.
Its fangs were motorized and they squealed back and forth.
"Scary," Juliana said.
I looked at the fangs of the motorized spider and realized that after this day, there
would be another one.




20

04.
Vaster Emptiness Achieved
by Guillaume Morissette


I like your mistakes good mistakes, I write to Anika in an email. I didn't know Anika and
then I saw her read poetry at some event and then read some of her poetry online and liked
it and then we met and talked a few times and for no reason began joking about constantly
making bad decisions and horrible distressing mistakes in our personal lives and then
somehow started writing daily-ish emails to update one another on the new mistakes we'd
made. We both like mistakes.
The mistake thread of probably intense self-loathing, is the title of our email
conversation.



My roommate found an abandoned cat and brought the cat in and the cat is antisocial. It
never climbs on furniture, hides in one room and only comes out when it thinks no one is
around.
Earlier I walked in on the cat petting itself using its own reflection in the mirror.



Last night I had uninspired sex with a person and I am seeing the person again on
thursday, I write to Anika. She seems to have unnecessary self-esteem issues so we're
bonding over that. She kept describing relationships in terms of either 'healthy' or
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'unhealthy' and I thought, that's such an odd classification, where did that come from,
seems insane, can't we come up with a better adjective to describe relationships.



Anika is seven years younger than me but her past relationships have felt like being gored
by a bull, forcing her to fast-forward through her emotional maturation process. She seems
disillusioned and also like she's deliberately trying to stay away from love or relationships
or any of those things.
Unless she had complete control over the terms of engagement, then maybe.



We write poetry, everyone hates us, do we really have to hate each other also.



I am so unmotivated at work that I don't even have the energy to quit.



Lonely would be a better adjective. A lonely or unlonely relationship.



Someone said, 'come to blizzarts' and I wanted to say no, Anika's email reads. If you
replace sleep with stress, that's how my week was. I could hear snowflakes falling and
melting inside my head. But I felt energized from the beer and also I wanted to get more
wasted than my friends, who have no responsibilities and get drunk by default a lot. If they
could have fun then I deserved to have at least twice the fun probably. My post-beer logic is
usually shitty like that. At blizzarts, my energy level went down quickly. I was sitting there
and it was like being in a duel against the pint of beer in my hand. I said generic stuff like,
22

'what are you drinking?' and, 'the music is very loud' and sat in the dark and felt bored then
laughed at myself and then felt bored again. I got not that much sleep and in the morning it
felt like my skull was cracked and that a flower was maybe growing through the crack. I ran
to catch the metro and heard air whistling though the crack.



I steal so much tea from work. I don't even need tea anymore, I just don't want them to
have it.



I am underwhelmed by the pool of sexual candidates in this town and if I keep trying it's
mostly out of boredom probably.



I didn't know cats could have seizures but apparently this cat is a cat that goes into shock
and starts convulsing and throws up a lot and then looks mentally disoriented for maybe an
hour.
Later the cat looks at me as if I was the one who had hurt it.



I think I really like Anika now but also it's never going to happen which is sad.



I am so tired. The only thing I am good at right now is staring thoughtlessly at nothing,
Anika's chat message reads. I am really good at it though. When I press the keys on the
keyboard, words appear in the chat box but it's like I only have a small amount of control
over them.
23




I like the internet because I envy the internet. It lives without the hindrance and limitations
of a body and I don't.



Either find me a wife or bury me in books, there is no third option.



That girl I had sex with, I say to Anika over beers, for some reason, her dad had given her
a ride so we had to shake hands through the car window. He left and so we sat at a table and
drank things and talked about other things. It didn't take long for me to feel like there was
some sort of invisible glass window between us and maybe a lack of positive intimacy also.
I open the fridge and grab two aluminium cans. We bought beer earlier and the beer we
bought seems to have awarded itself a blue ribbon, for prettiest beer maybe.
As a communicator, she's like a walled garden or something. I basically had no idea
what she was thinking or how she was thinking it. It felt like we were playing a game of
emotional poker, trying to protect ourselves by keeping our intentions hidden from one
another. We weren't being honest or saying what we were thinking, which never leads
anywhere other than disappointment or a slow burn.
I wish people would say more concrete things, Anika says, like, I like this person and
would be okay with that person and me having sex and then after that evaluating whether
we wanted to have sex again in the future or not.



Buy nothing, move forward linearly through time, never think anything.


24


I was trying to impress her and felt stupid, like a toy poodle jumping through a very large
hoop.



A day and a half later I emailed her to tell her that I liked her but that this wouldn't work
out and that I would start looking elsewhere, I write in an email to Anika. She got back to
me saying she thought I was good but felt destroyed inside for the time being and that it
made things difficult for her and that she was sorry and other things. I replied an intense,
novel-sized email on pain and the reduction of pain. I didn't intend for the email to be that
long, I just typed things until my hands were out of typing. Then later or maybe the next day
she came up to me on facebook chat and thanked me and later complained about her food
situation. I told her that I wouldn't let her starve to death and that she should come by. She
made me wait all day and texted new excuses as the day went on and the first thing that
came out of her mouth when I opened the door was, 'I almost ditched you.' Right away, I felt
like I was dealing with her vaguely bitter self as opposed to her somewhat caring self. We
ended up saying mean things to each other and later we still went to a bar but as soon as I
could I ditched her without saying goodbye.



I moved to Montreal two years ago. I only know Montreal as it appears to me now, not as a
city in decline or on the rise but as a city of transition, a purgatory of some sort. People
come here to experience growth but not finality. When they start feeling like they've
exhausted either themselves or the city, they move elsewhere. The party scene fuels itself
on youth, giving the illusion that no one is getting older, just you. Retirements from the
scene occur not in the limelight but in the shadows.
Montreal feels like a UPS centre, packages coming and going, creating motion,
instability, shifting supplies and demands. Living situations have fast-approaching
expiration dates while romantic pairings are more like brackets in a giant tournament tree.

25



Staring at web pages until I become a web page.



I made a game out of stealing tea from work. How much tea can I steal in one afternoon,
fifteen tea packets, can I steal twenty.



It became obvious that she was insane probably and an abyss that no amount of love or
affection could ever bridge, I write to Anika, so I did something wise I think but out-of-
character for me, which is to suddenly drop her from my life and phone and facebook
without telling her anything. At first, she texted me things and left progressively more
accusatory voicemail messages but then I wasn't responding so eventually she got bored and
moved on.



We were hoping that doing nothing and investing no money would make the cat seizures go
away but now the cat is averaging a seizure a day almost. Today the cat was lying on the
floor then stood up and jumped up a little then lay down then stood up again and then fell to
its side, its eyes wide and expanding and very dramatic.
The internet told us that our options include medicine like phenobarbitals, having the
cat put down or way too expensive surgery.
Can you do something for free, I ask a person from the vet clinic.
If you bring the cat to us while it's having a seizure, we can give it laughing gas to
make the seizure stop, the person says.



26

I wish I was a shooting star.



Talk to me tomorrow and I will tell you what happened tonight, I type in the chat box.



I saw her last night, I write to Anika. I was talking with a person and she wedged herself
between us and said hi. I was three beers in and felt defiant and like a big person also. I am a
little surprised by how cold-blooded I was and also by how good being cold-blooded to her
felt. Being an asshole is great. Did you know that, I didn't know that at all. She was with a
guy who had long hair and was handsome and his pants were ripped in multiple places, like
he was wearing some sort of fishing net made out of jeans. She said, 'I've been meaning to
talk to you' and then a really long sentence that ended with, 'I miss you.' I said, 'okay' in an
unimpressed sort of way and then she said something like, 'I don't know why you dropped
me.' I said, 'why do you think' and she said, 'we should be friends' and then switched to her
cute voice and added, 'hug' while pouting a little. I said, 'no' in an amused sort of way, as if
she had asked me to do something really stupid, like jumping off a cliff with a horse or
something. She started talking about the guy she was with but I interrupted her and said,
'you know that's going to end badly, why do you even bother' and that's when she finally got
mad and walked away.



Never log out of facebook.



Shake hands nod a lot appear sociable but not desperate network that kind of crap.


27


By the way, of all living entities, girls are the most insane, I write. What's more insane, a
girl or an octopus or an oak tree. Out of all those things, a girl is the most insane. Out of
everything, a girl is the most insane.



My heart is a bargain really.



Someone at work finally noticed the rate at which tea disappears. Later, the person closed
his office door angrily. Later, the person faxed things less angrily but still angrily.
They don't know it's me. They wouldn't fire a person for this I think. I feel like I should
maybe frame someone for this, just to see what happens.



I am okay, Anika types in the chat box, I just wish that today was tomorrow and that
tomorrow was also tomorrow.



At the poetry reading I read poetry and then Anika read poetry. We both read poetry.



You suck, I felt.



28

Anika this is Jess, I say. Anika is the shit and Jess is also the shit. So you guys have
something in common.



I was trying to say serious things but I was seriously drunk.



On facebook, people don't feel like people, they feel like smaller versions of themselves.
Kind of like standing on a rooftop and looking down and seeing people from afar as small
and insignificant and ant-like and then thinking, I could crush them like party cups.



And yeah, we did make out briefly, I write to Anika. Also you showed me your left tit and
I played with it a little I think. I didn't think anything of it other than drunken fooling
around. Probably just curiosity on my end, find out what kissing Anika feels like. I don't
know, I don't think it changed anything on my end. I still like you in the same way.



Within ten minutes we were making out. Maybe all we needed was an initial transgression.



Bedmate.



My hands are door knobs. When I was a little kid, art class for me felt like being mugged.
One time we had to make a thing and I can't remember what the thing was but I remember
29

that there were several steps and that I had made a shitty dolphin by drawing over some
pre-made outline. The last step was to paint it and after that I was done.
But I messed up. I messed up and tried correcting my mistake and messed up even
more. Something like thirty minutes later, my teacher walked by and became agitated and
shouted questions like, 'what did you do' and the entire class looked and laughed and yelled
mean things so I tossed the thing in the garbage and ran out of the classroom crying.
I didn't say anything to anyone for maybe four days after that. Instead, I tucked my
head inside my shirt and refused to make eye contact with others. I would eat lunch with my
head tucked in my shirt while pretending that nothing outside my shirt existed.
That humiliation was probably the beginning of my inner life.



It's summer though, that's normal, Anika tells me while sitting on my bed. My distraction
level is usually the same as the temperature. If it's minus seventeen outside then I feel like I
am minus seventeen distracted.



Help me get drunk or go away.



There are a few subplots to this party.
My roommate's cousin is in town for a few days. Drugs are going around and my
roommate doesn't want his cousin to know that yeah, sometimes he does drugs. He tried to
get him drunk on whiskey but they're both drunk on whiskey now. His plan backfired, sort
of.
Another subplot is that Anika doesn't want her friend Shannon to find out about me for
now because we have friends in common.
Anika is leaving and I am going to leave ten minutes from now. We're not being very
subtle or clever, just subtle or clever enough to feel like we've tried.
30


I don't know how to evaluate whether being with Anika is a good thing or a bad thing or
a neutral thing or what is it. I feel like I should get myself a suggestion box, label it life
advice, put it around my neck, carry it around and just let people tell me what to do.



I like to communicate a lot when I am with another person, not just mine her body for
pleasure but also her mind.



Anika is being an asshole to me I think. She's been off the map for a few days, reduced
online presence, not responding to her emails or else being evasive, dodgy. I don't think I
did anything wrong, I wasn't an asshole to her or anything, which is probably what I did
wrong.
Normally, in a situation like this, I would email Anika and describe the problem to her
and stare directly at the problem the way a stem cell researcher would stare at a stem cell
and then later I would feel liberated or maybe just at a greater distance from the problem. I
don't know who to email this time.



Sitting at the computer typing stuff while time passes outside.



A new entry for my collection of rejection letters from literary magazines.



31

The person who was angry about the tea was standing behind me and I reached inside my
left pocket for my keycard to open the door and what came out wasn't my keycard and so
there I was, holding right in front of him a bunch of tea packets that came out of my pocket.



She might be acting cold towards me because I wasn't an asshole to her and her past
experiences taught her that by this point usually someone is an asshole to someone.



This morning I have downsized my life to a cup of tea and a rectangle that allows me to click
on things or people that I'll never have or be. It feels more manageable.




32

05.
I am Sitting on an Air Mattress Reading Lorrie
Moore Short Stories as You Fall Asleep
by Justin Carter


I want to be a large fish, she says as you sit together on an air mattress. A barracuda or
something.
A swordfish, you say. Youd be a swordfish. You are naked inside your apartment,
the two of you holding hands on the living room floor. The room is empty & the faint glow of
the computer scene provides the only light. This is the fourth night she has spent with you.
I could kill people if I was a swordfish, she says. I could stab them in their fucking
hearts.
You nod your head, touch one finger to her cheek, & tell her you would too, but know
you are lying. She laughs. You hold her body next to yours, fall asleep. In the morning she
will not be there. Your wallet will be empty & you will close your eyes again, the world
fading back into a dull-tinted dream.



The Sad Young Childrens Choir is three blocks south of your apartment, in a small building
on West 18th. The children there are from broken homes. Alcoholic mothers. Abusive
fathers. Brothers that listen to The Ramones & snort cocaine in the basement & write poems
in red ink, or maybe in their own blood, on the walls, poems about killing society & burning
down Starbucks. The children all have one thing in common: a generous sense of sarcasm.
33

This is why they are the Sad Young Childrens Choir. They are not too sad. They can laugh at
themselves, see past the shittiness of their current situation. Their parents do not come to
their recitals, do not see their children perform Singing in the Rain in four-part vocal
harmony, but no one cries. Rich men in suits & women in velvet dresses will watch them
sing. They will donate large sums of money to the choir. These children are our future, they
say as the write the checks. Then they go home to the suburbs & drink Chardonnay in their
boxers on the couch & watch Matlock reruns.
The children have three options when they grow up: the stars will get scholarships to
the prestigious music schools on the East Coast & will eventually either sing Off-Broadway
or will teach middle school choir classes in rural towns. The smart ones, the ones that work
behind the scenes fixing things will become engineers or will work at coal plants. The
others, the background singers, are unpredictable. Drugs, for most. Unplanned pregnancies.
Forty ounce bottles of Olde English on the curb. You were a background singer.



You left the Choir at eighteen. This is when they start to kick people out, tell them to find a
new place to live. Theres a ten-year-old boy from one of the Wards whose father is in prison
for selling crack rocks & whose mother is currently traveling with the carnival to make ends
meet & he needs somewhere to stay & you are legally an adult & this boy needs this, really
needs this, so you get a call from the main office, a few hundred dollars, & the addresses to
some cheap apartment complexes.
You found a place north of the Choir home. Bills paid, 400 a month. You chose it
because it was still close to the home, to the only place you could remember knowing. You
bought a couch from a resale shop, found work stocking boxes at Kroger. The couch smelt of
stale mildew but you did not want to sit on the floor, because it had just as many stains on it.
Your bed is a blow-up mattress that you took from a garage sale. It was ten dollars, but when
no one was looking, you snuck out of the yard with it.



She takes the money. In the morning, unsure of what to do, you walk to the Sad Young
34

Childrens Choir & stand in front of the office door for five minutes. You imagine walking
inside.
Hello, the receptionist will say. How may I help you?
Home, you will say. This is home.
Sir, she will say. Sir, please leave.
Then she would press a button & two large men would appear. They would grab your
arms, lift you up, take you back out the door & drop you on the sidewalk. They would yell
you to never return.
You walk back to your apartment.
You dont hear from her for four days, then there is a knock on the door. You open it
but leave the chain hooked to the wall, keeping her from rushing inside.
Let me in, she says. Its fucking cold out here. Its snowing.
You have a jacket, you say.
Im wearing shorts too, she says. Open the damn door.
You let her in. She throws her jacket onto the couch, comes over & kisses you deeply.
You watch Garden State with her.
I want to do that, she says.
What, you say.
That, she says. The trailer shit, standing on top of it & screaming into a giant hole. I
want to do that with you.
You dont say anything. You hold her hand, keep watching the movie. You think about
the first time you met her, at a bar. A reading by some graduate students. She was sitting in
the back, asking a bald man to buy her drinks, but he wouldnt do it. There was one open
seat, next to her.
Buy me a beer, she said.
Im eighteen, you said.
Fuck that, she said.
She seemed simple, you thought, & you seemed lonely & you wanted to hold her hand
or something, but you didnt.
One of the poets read a sad poem about Frank OHara & love. My soul is the motion/of
a million ships/on the day Lady died.
She laughed when he said this & everyone looked at her with slanted eyes.
35

Sorry, she said loudly when the poem ended. I thought it was all a joke.
When the movie ends you open Birds of Paradise by Lorrie Moore & read a story from
it until she falls asleep. Then you take the money from your wallet, hide it in an empty
coffee can, & put the can on the top shelf in the bathroom. In morning she is gone. There is a
note beside you that says Fuck You.
You remember, after the reading, you snuck out of the bar quickly because you felt too
self-conscious to be around writers for too long. She had followed you out, chased you down
the sidewalk.
I liked the OHara poem, she said.
It was sad, you said.
Everything is sad, she said.



She comes back a few days later, knocks on the door. You open it, see trackmarks on her
arms, grab her hands. She screams.
I wish I was a fucking swordfish, she says. So I could stab you right now.
She walks out the door, maybe for the last time. You dont know. She has a problem &
you know you need to do something but you dont know what. Try to love her, a friend says.
Try to love her so you are not alone.
She comes back. Two hours later, the soft knock at the door that you have grown
accustomed to.
Im sorry, she says. Heres forty bucks.
Thanks, you say. Then, without thinking, come inside.
She comes in, begins to take her clothes off right away. In the morning, the money is
still inside your wallet.
That night, you drive her to the beach. It is raining. You spend most of the money she
gave you on gas and cigarettes.
Here, she says, handing you a full bottle of wine. You take a swig of it, dont ask her
where it came from. She tilts the bottle to her own mouth & swallows it down.
At the beach, you pull the car close to the dunes. She takes her clothes off. Come on,
she says, running toward the water. But you arent moving. Youre standing by the car,
36

sipping wine from the bottle, drawing circles in the dust on your hood.\
I think a mosquito bit me, you say when she gets out of the water. A lot of
mosquitoes.
Be more fun, she says. I miss you being more fun. Come out in the water. She
smiles at you, starts to inch back toward the water. Itll be fun.
You start to walk toward the water, taking your clothes off slowly, throwing your
phone into the sand.
No mosquitoes here, she says.
Just swordfish, you say.
Sing, she says. You never sing to me.
You sing an Elliot Smith song. She turns her head away, probably to cry, but she never
lets you see her cry unless she is angry.
Backup singer, she says when you finish. I can see that.



Every year the Choir performs a musical. Your final year it was Grease. You auditioned for
the lead role. You were Danny. You had to be. You stayed in character for a week before the
audition, wore a leather jacket from the Lost & Found bin. This was your big chance.
Then: the day of the audition you forget the words & are cast as Eugene. It still makes
you feel sad & alone. It was your last musical, your last chance, but, you thought, it isnt all
bad. Eugene is a named role, & you had never had one of those before, had always been
listed as Backup Singer in the program. But it didnt matter. It wasnt a lead role. You began
to think about your future, about the way you would end up in prison. Burglary, you
decided. Youd steal something from one of the rich men that donate to the Choir. Steal his
car. Steal his boat & sail to the middle of the ocean before turning back. The police waiting
at the shore to arrest you. This, you decided, is how it would happen.
Opening night, you forgot the words to the Alma Mater & are replaced by your
understudy for the rest of the performances.



37

One night you caught her stealing. It had been happening for awhile. Small things at first:
quarters, shirts you hadnt worn in years, food.
Then it is money. You walked into the bathroom, saw her standing there with your
wallet empty on the counter.
What the hell, you said.
She stood there, put the money in her pocket. Shrugged.
I need it, she said. Sorry.
This isnt okay, you said.
Sorry, she said, & walked out of the room, then out the front door.
Heroin. Thats what she was doing, probably before you met her. The days she came
around were the good days, the days before the withdrawals started & she had to go get
more. You loved her on those days. You could walk the sidewalks of the city, eat shitty
Chinese takeout, listen to bands playing at the record store. But then there were the bad
days, when she just needed money. She tried to stay away on those days at first, but you
kept inviting her in. By the time you realize there is a problem, it is too late. Continuity, a
friend says. Keep things the same for her, otherwise shit might get bad for you. A juggling
act.
The days you loved her, the days that she was normal, you didnt want to be anywhere
else. But then the other days, the days she would see you & either walk away or start cussing
you out, those days you didnt know what to think. How to feel. Didnt know why you loved
her at all.



Your father left you with the Choir on your fifth birthday. There are rumors about where he
went: Mexico to escape federal prosecution, South America to join a Communist resistance
force, somewhere in Central Texas to have a new family, start over without you. You never
know which story to believe. Most of the children with the Choir know where their parents
are but were there because it represented something better. You do not know how true this
is, though. You want to live in a house with people, with parents that go to bed at ten every
night after they finish watching a crime drama. Parents that cook green bean casserole
twice a month & add a few too many onions, so that you dont really enjoy eating it but you
38

still eat it anyway. You want a sister down the hallway talking loudly on the phone every
night & a brother that plays quarterback for the Junior Varsity football team. But you do not
have this, or if you do, you arent there to see it.



After you get back to your apartment and shower, get the sand out of the crevices of your
bodies, she orders pizza & you eat it on the mildewed couch. They are out of Parmesan
cheese, the delivery boy says, but there are extra red pepper packs in the bag.
You do not tip him.
You fall asleep. The trackmarks are still on her arms, but in the morning she is still
there with you & you start to think about her changing, sobering up. That you will tell her
that you are falling for her after this, when the side you love kills the side you dont.
But she isnt changing. Good days and bad days, your friend told you. By afternoon she
will probably be gone again, your wallet empty. Youll walk the streets, singing quietly to
yourself, looking in every place she might be, in every clothing boutique or Vietnamese
noodle shop or abandoned motel. Maybe you will find her in one of these places, a needle
sticking out of her arm. Maybe you wont. Maybe you will get a call, have to go down to the
morgue & identify a body. It will be covered in a blue tarp, inside a large metal box. Theyll
slide it out, uncover it, & you wont look.



39

06.
A First-Hand Account of 72 hours of Intervention
by Lily Dawn


Thursday

Almost 6 o'clock. Just got breathalyzed and had my suitcase searched.
The woman that breathalyzed me was old, overweight, and gave me a hug. She was
very squishy.
I brought a Mandala Coloring Book. When the security guard checked my suitcase,
he couldn't fit the book back in, and I had to carry it under my arm.
A poster of 4 babies hangs on the wall, each of different nationalities.
All other woman are older and overweight, as predicted. Not many women, though.



I am in my room. Roommate isn't here yet, but I am expecting someone to walk in at any
moment.
I am feeling extreme anxiety over what they will be like, the TV is flatscreen, hope
they don't watch it all night/very loud.
I took the bed next to the window. When I look out, I see a lot of concrete, a Sheetz gas
station, and the second largest Walmart in the country (world?).
All the furniture in my room seems to be made out of red oak, but it is just really cheap
wood with a red stain.
It is almost time to leave for orientation, and my roommate isn't here yet. I can see a
40

cum stain on the bedskirt of her bed.



Now it is almost 9 pm.
When I opened the door to go to orientation, my roommate was just standing on the
other side. I introduced myself and immediately forgot her name.
Everyone has to wear name tags at all times. I will see her name tag eventually.
Orientation was not boring, but I didn't want to be there. They talked a lot about cigarettes.
Everyone was pissed about having their cigarettes taken away. We were told we weren't
allowed to bring more than 3 packs of cigarettes each. So they take your 3 packs of
cigarettes and put them in a Ziplock bag. The bag then goes into a big tote filled with
everyone else's cigarette bags. There are designated smoke breaks. The guard brings the
tote outside and everyone gets their cigarettes. When the smoke break is over, everyone
puts their cigarette bags back into the tote and come inside together.
None of this applies to me because I don't smoke.
Prescription medication is similar. Your pills are taken away from you and put in a
Ziplock bag. The guard (whom I will call Terry) comes around at 8 pm when the day is over
and administers the night pills. He comes back to the room at 7:30 am to administer
morning pills.
This also doesn't apply to me, as I have no prescription medication.
After being lectured on cigarette and pill procedures, we were made to watch an anti-
driving video. I say anti-driving because it makes you not want to drive, at all. It was 40
minutes of mangled, bloody dead body close-ups from car wrecks. It wasn't just drunk
driving, it was also about seat belts and becoming distracted by changing out CDs.
It was disgusting and unnecessary.
It showed some moms crying, and I really didn't appreciate how they were trying to
use emotional manipulation. I was mostly just grossed out by the 300+ photos of dead bodies
and videos of cleanup crews dragging dead bodies around towards body bags.
Our main lecturer, whom I will call Carol, explained to us why our cell phones were
confiscated. They do not want us to put photographs or videos of our time here on the
internet. Something about a Federal Privacy law, which makes it illegal to talk about what
41

has happened here. She does not want us to share other peoples' stories.
We were then sent back to our rooms. My roommate and I talked smallishly about how
this sucks but how the beds are nice. I think the beds are too hard, but it seemed like a good
trick to just agree with her.
Terry came in to give my roommate her medication. I don't know what it is, so I am
just imagining that she is taking anti-psychotics and could snap and kill me at any moment.
Carol gave us homework to do overnight, which is a 7-page double-sided packet with
4 different sections in it: Drinking and Drug history, the night of the arrest, critical thinking
of how to avoid drunk driving in various scenarios, and 20 personal questions.
I worked on the packet and listened to Ananda Shankar on headphones while Terry
gave my roommate her pills. He motioned for me to take the headphones out, then went on
to tell us that we are not allowed to leave the room again until 7:50 am. At the time it was
about 8:20 pm. He held up a fat roll of masking tape and said he was going to put a large
strip of tape on the seal of the door so that he will know if we leave. He then told us about
the security cameras in the hallways that will see us if we try to get out.
Terry left. Immediately, there was the loud, awful, uncomfortable noise of Terry
pulling a very long strip of masking tape off the roll. Then the sound of him rubbing it
against the door.



Here are some things I know about my roommate:
-She is probably around 40 years old.
-She looks like she smokes and drinks a lot. She is youthful but has baggy, loose skin.
-She likes basketball. She asked me if I minded her watching the Miami/Oklahoma City
final. She said something about wanting to know if Lebron gets that ring he's been talking
about. I didn't know what she was talking about, and I said I don't watch TV and she can
watch whatever she wants.
-Currently, she is sleeping and lightly snoring, even though it is only the 2
nd
inning.
-She has kids and sometimes watches cartoons with them.
-She is wearing a bright yellow Cavs shirt.
I am hungry and there is no food and I cannot leave the room.
42



Friday

There is no power button on the TV itself.
Apparently, I cannot sleep with the TV on.
My roommate has a prescription to sleeping pills, which she says is why she passed out
so fast last night.
I was up until at least 1:30 am because I could not find a power button, and I finally
took the remote off of my roommate's bed about that time.
We went downstairs together, and Terry became extremely upset with me because I
had a bagel on a plate from the breakfast bar. I guess we are supposed to wait for everyone
else. I don't remember hearing that yesterday. I don't understand why Terry was so mad at
me. I didn't eat the bagel and I actually went up to ask him if we were supposed to eat yet.
He actually raised his voice very loud at me, which I don't understand. Terry may or may not
be stereotyped as an angry black man from here on out.



My roommate drinks so much Mountain Dew, it's crazy. Between the one hour she was
awake in our room last night and this morning, she has already drank 2 cans and bottles of
it. I know because those are the only things in the trashcan so far. This doesn't mean
anything. This is comic relief from angry black Terry. Also, instead of bringing books to
read, my roommate brought about 5 issues of People magazine and US weekly.
I brought The Elements of Zen and a Mandala coloring book. I colored some of a
mandala just now, and I feel better about Terry being rude to me. I am sure he deals with a
lot of assholes and shitheads, but that doesn't mean he has to yell at me for having an
untouched bagel on a plate.



This morning we did a group exercise and 4 different groups had to come up with reasons
43

why people drink. The guy who wrote down the list for my group was a huge jerk. He was
wearing Walmart jeans and a bright orange Harley Davidson shirt. He is a redneck. There
was a well-dressed young black man in the group, and every time he would make a
suggestion for the list, the redneck would say something rude and try to make the young
black man feel stupid. I could not believe the audacity and false sense of authority the
redneck was asserting.
There was also a young mixed man who's face is reminiscent of a Roswell Alien's face.
He sits at the same table as I do. There are two people at each table. Every time he sits or
stands, he bumps into the table, and my coffee splashes out of its cup. He feels bad about it,
but I think it's kind of funny. I don't care if he keeps spilling my coffee. The spills are a
distraction from what is really going on around me.
The guy who sits in front of me has a 6-inch long rat tail and wears a black shirt that
says HARD CORE LIVES. He is white, his face is scraggly, he is probably about 27. He is
wearing very tight bootcut jeans and has very large gauged holes in his ears. He does not
wear the gauges.
The guy who sits in front of him is an old rebel who looks like he has been drinking in
the sun his whole life and doing lots of drugs out there, also. He is about 50, his skin is
leather. His face is sunken in. He has long, thick hair, which he obviously washes and combs,
takes good care of.
The man that sits next to the rebel is an old balding crackhead, skinny, black, cannot
read the pamphlets, talks incoherently, but managed to tell the entire room that a gram of
crack currently costs $20.
We watched another video which showed dead bodies and crying mothers.
Carol talked about drug addiction and I realized this program is not strictly for
drinkers. There are people here for drugs. Nobody asks them, but they seem to want
everyone to know that they are different, that they are here for drugs.
There is an Asian American here a few years younger than myself who is here for
marijuana. He talks a lot and is wearing a tie-dye Grateful Dead shirt. He talks quite loud and
keeps making comments about everything. He tried to argue with Carol about how the
marijuana laws are unfair.
I went into my room before lunch while everyone else went out to smoke cigarettes.
The maids had been in and made our beds. Seems unnecessary, but nice. Unsure if I have
44

ever had anyone make my bed for me before.
There were meatball subs for lunch catered by a pizza place. The program ordered
special veggie subs for me because I told them I was vegetarian. I should have said vegan.
There were also really greasy chips. And pickles. And endless coffee all day.
The news was on in the lobby, and everyone watched it while eating their subs and
chips. I sat next to a guy who looks like my half brother and told him that I was sitting next
to him because of that. He said, I'm not your half brother.
A story came on the news about how teens in China are wearing t-shirts with Chairman
Mao on them. A guy eating a meatball sub said, I don't know who that is.
I said that Mao was an awful person.
The Grateful Dead Asian American said, Yeah, he was debatably worse that Hitler. You
ever hear that Beatles' song, 'Revolution'? In it, they say, 'don't go talking about Chairman
Mao, or you won't be getting with anyone anyway.' Like, he was so bad, that you weren't
even supposed to talk about him, or nobody would wanna get with you.
I just stared at the rest of my sandwich and didn't correct him and thought about how
a guy in a tie-dye Grateful Dead shirt wouldn't know what he was talking about anyways.
The Grateful Dead Asian American then asked me if Chairman Mao was dead.
I said, What? He is very dead.
My false half brother repeated very dead and laughed.
After lunch, we were made to watch a Dr. Phil episode about how silly and stupid
people act when they get drunk. The people in Dr. Phil's controlled experiment were just
drinking a shitload and getting wasted and making out with each other. Dr. Phil then talked
to a married couple where the wife would go out drinking on weekends and the husband
didn't like it. He would yell at the wife when she came home drunk.
We then had to separate into groups again to come up with what we thought was
wrong with the couple and how they could change. The Harley Davidson shirt guy seized
control again. The rat tail guy said something, but his words were mixed up out of order.
The Harley Davidson guy pretended he could not understand the rat tail guy and belittled
him by making him repeat himself until he said it correctly. Most suggestions that we made,
Harley Davidson completely disregarded and just wrote what he wanted. He ignored all of
my suggestions completely. When he read the list off in front of the room, everything he had
written down was narrow-minded and extremely sexist.
45

I was upset by him, and I am not going to sit in that area of the room again tomorrow.
After this, we watched a 2 hour long Lifetime movie about drinking. It was from the 80s
and had Keanu Reeves in it.
Some of us tried on beer goggles and decided that it was nothing like being drunk, and
that it was much more like being on acid.
A kid had his Kindle Fire confiscated because he was checking Facebook.



It is still Friday, and we just ate dinner. The dinner was 45 minutes late and was cold rigatoni
which was all hard and stick together. While eating, a group of about 7 older men dressed in
golfing attire walked into the lobby to check in and started talking very loud about
showering together.
If we shower together, we could all meet down here a half hour earlier.
Okay, but I would need to take a couple caps first, heh.
Everyone in our intervention group was snickering over their hard rigatoni.



We watched a love movie called When a Man Loves a Woman and it was so bad. It stared
Meg Ryan, and she was an alcoholic. It was so boring that I fell right asleep when we were
sent to our rooms afterwards for the night.



Saturday

Today we are in groups with counselors. The counselor I got, Shirley, is a very funny old
black woman who keeps saying things like, asshole cops and mother fuckin.
Everyone had to tell about how they got arrested. One guy said the cops found him in a
ditch with his shirt off and pants unzipped, and he doesn't remember. Another guy said he
woke up in the hospital and doesn't know what happened, except that his truck is all
46

smashed up now. He called his two friends to see what happened and they told him they
ended up at the hospital too, but because they had been slipped date rape drug. The guy
figures he took a few drinks from their cups and passed out while he was driving.
One woman swears she wasn't even driving, but actually switched seats with her son
when they got pulled over because he didn't have a license and was on probation. He wasn't
drunk, but she was.
Another woman only blew a .04, but since she had her kids in the car, she got arrested.
My roommate wasn't even drinking when she got pulled over, but was all fucked up on
Ambien and muscle relaxers. She also had her kids in the car.
Rat tail guy drank an entire bottle of Jack Honey.
The guy who isn't my half brother got arrested wearing a tuxedo after playing in an
orchestra concert.
Leathery skin guy got his DUI 20 years ago in Florida, and it has just caught up to
him now that all the states are connected through the internet.
The old crackhead guy didn't make any sense when he told his story. He was drooling
all over himself as he managed to babble some nonsensical words.



We had gross, greasy pizza for lunch.
The well-dressed young black man sat with me and told me that I looked like I never
get into any trouble. Seemed funny. All I said was that I got caught. I told him about all the
people in the group that I thought were weird: the Harley Davidson guy, the tall nerdy
scientist dad, the guy with the weird red zombie eye.
Back in the counseling group after pizza, we went through scenarios where you had to
think of a way home that didn't involve drunk driving. This seemed tough for everyone
because I think we all would have just chose to drive drunk in every scenario.
Learned about how you don't become an addict until you pass your tolerance level,
which is some unknown limit everyone has, and then when you pass your tolerance level
and become and addict, you get THIQ floating around, which is some crazy chemical your
brain starts processing when you become addicted to a chemical substance. It never leaves
your body, even if you overcome addiction. THIQ just stays in your body and makes it easier
47

for you to become addicted to substances again.
I want to know if I have THIQ from being addicted to anything.
We had to watch a movie starring Sandra Bullock from the 90s called 28 days. She is
an alcoholic who goes to rehab... just like the movie with Meg Ryan. While we watched that,
people were being taken for one-on-one interviews with the counselor. Yesterday we all had
to take some addiction psychoanalysis test, and the counselor wanted to go over our results
with us. My results were normal, except it said that I was unusually responsible, but also
very likely to commit another drug-related crime, which doesn't make much sense to me.



Dinner was gross. There were chicken wings and jojos. I didn't stand in line because I didn't
want to eat that. Then dudes started talking about me not standing in line. One guy said,
Hey I heard you were vegetarian, and I said Yea. Then I felt weird, so I hid around the
corner, and I could still hear people talking about me being vegetarian, like it was some
freaky alien thing to them. I felt anxious and went in the bathroom to hide. When I came
out, the delivery guy gave me a personal cheese pizza, which I guess the program director
pre-ordered for me. The tie-dye shirt Asian (who today was wearing a tie-dye Pink Floyd
shirt, probably from the same place in the mall) said very loudly, I respect vegetarians, but
I just love meat, it's so delicious! to which I responded, NO ONE FUCKING ASKED YOU.



After dinner, Terry made us watch Crazy Heart, where Jeff Bridges plays an alcoholic
country singer who loses his girlfriend's son in a mall, then goes to rehab and gets better
(third rehab movie in 2 days). It just seemed to drag on forever, even though it was the first
good movie they've shown us all weekend.
Heh. I am sitting in bed eating cookies and Terry came in to give my roommate her
pills (I just saw her Ziplock bag of pills; she must have at least 7 bottles in there!) and he said
to me You eating AGAIN? You couldn't even finish your pizza!
Terry, the pizza here is so greasy! There's a difference between some old greasy pizza
and these cookies!
48

Yeah, Terry said, I don't even eat the food here. Though I did eat some chicken
wings today.
When my roommate falls asleep, I am going to take a bath, I think.



Sunday

I took a bath, and when I came out, my roommate was still awake and watching a show
called 48 hours in which a Long Island serial killer had a thing for prostitutes from
Craigslist. I don't get why the show was called 48 hours because the killings took place
over several years, and the show was probably only 1 hour long.



Terry woke me up at 7 am to pay my $10 phone bill for talking to Mallory on the phone last
night for 7 minutes.
After breakfast, everyone had a good time watching a drunk driving film from the 80s
where a bunch of police recruits got drunk and tried to drive through an obstacle course.
We were sent to our rooms to pack up our things. It was kind of sad almost, not
because I don't want to leave, but because I am very tired today and had to not crawl back
into the bed. Now I am probably not going to be able to lay in a bed until around 8 pm. It is
12:30 pm right now.
A sheriff was supposed to come in to talk to us today, but he didn't want to. I am glad
because I hate pigs. Instead, we watched another blood and gore dead body drunk driving
film.
At lunch, there were special veggie wraps for me, and one of the old overweight
women said, Ooooh veggie wraps for Lily, all snarky and smug-like. Maybe they will try
not eating meat now because they seem upset that the only young and skinny woman here
doesn't eat meat. They probably are thinking right at this moment that vegetarianism is the
next big weight loss diet, and they want to hop on that real bad. During meals, they all sit at
a table together (there are only 4 other women) and take turns glancing/glaring at me while
49

I pretend to stare at the food on my plate (but I am really watching them glance/glare at me
out of my peripherals.)



I think my roommate is addicted to pills (Ambien, muscle relaxers, painkillers), and every
time I look at her, she seems really fucked up, like you would have to do a shit ton of pills to
look like her.



I feel really stupid learning about signs of addiction because I keep thinking of half my
friends and how obvious their conditions must be to someone who already knows what
addiction looks like. Even though I knew they had drug problems, I never realized their odd
behavior was just typical of everyone with addictions. I suppose the one thing that really
upsets me about having to be trapped in this program is that I can name 10 people I am close
and personal with that should have been sitting in my seat the entire weekend instead of
me.



We had an AA meeting (yea really) and some old meathead from AA came in to speak to us
and tell us his story of getting 3 DUIs and crashing his car a whole bunch and getting
divorced and cheating on his womens and then he joined AA and found God and oh man
the whole time I kept Jesus when will this end, this is fucking stupid.
After the AA guys left we had to take a road rage true or false quiz. I was the only
person who answered everything false, which means that I have no road rage, at all.
Everyone else laughed at me because I have somehow been dubbed the sweet and innocent
one. After the quiz we watched a corny film about road rage.
We got back into our groups and were made to make a list of reasons people get
distracted and cause accidents while driving. As the only girl in the group (with 7 men), I
was surprised that I had to be the one to say road head, as that seemed like the most
50

obvious distraction to me. The men were just in shock and disbelief that the sweet and
innocent one said road head.
Around 4:30 pm we graduated and were actually given diplomas and our cell phones
back. Everyone clapped for everyone else while they were being handed their diplomas.
THEN WE WERE SET FREE.



I stood outside the hotel with the kid who looks like my half-brother, the tie-dye Asian
American, the rat tail guy, and the Kindle Fire kid.
The tie-dye Asian American and the half-brother kid both used my cell phone to call
their parents. The tie-dye Asian American kid wanted to know what my story was, how did I
get into OVI school, because obviously I am too sweet and innocent looking to do anything
wrong. Then he asked if I smoked weed. I told him not since I went to the hospital.
He said, You can't OD on weed!
I said, Yea, I didn't say I OD'ed on weed.
Rat tail kid said, You can OD on weed, but you would have to smoke twice your body
weight of it within, like, an hour. It's physically impossible!
Then he kept saying, Do you know how much a pound of weed is? It is like this much,
and he kept making a box gesture with his hands to show us that he obviously knows how
much weed is in a pound.
The Kindle Fire kid said, Hey speaking of, if you guys need any weed or drugs or
anything, hit me up.


51

07.
Karen, the Most Well Endowed Among Us
by Frances Dinger


When we were young and someone asked us each what we wanted to be when we grew up,
we more often answered with animals than actual careers. Children of wealth, we didnt
know about work but we knew about hunger, extreme happiness, and the group think
shared among six sisters close in age. We wanted to be lions, puppies, an entire colony of
bees.
We knew we could not grow up to be animals. We were intentionally problematic, yes.
We resolved to be something not entirely human. Some high school-aged girls make
pregnancy pacts but we made a pact to be hairy and unapproachable. This was easy,
consider all of us stood near or at exactly six feet tall, did not shave our legs, and our hair
would have dreaded had our mother not shoved our heads underwater herself. Mother took
us shopping, hoping we would take an interest in fashion, which we did, but we happened to
all have the same taste.
In winter, we were allowed to pick out a couple sweaters each. We traded them among
ourselves, wearing and washing them, stretching out the chests with our different sized
breasts, Karen the most well endowed among us. By May when it was warm enough to leave
the house without an extra layer, the sweaters sat misshapen in a sad heap of angora, wool
and yarn in the corners of our closets. And then in spring, it was back to the mall for more
clothes. One year, we all insisted on the same one piece romper in white. In public, we
looked like some perverse tribe, pale Amazon women. We might as well not have spoken
English. We all did very poorly in school, though we understood the lessons. Instead of doing
homework, we made jam and collages and ate lots of sweets.
52

When Karen was the first of us to drop out of school, Mother resolved the next best
thing was to find her a good husband. There are dating sites specifically devoted to people
seeking spouses, women who want to stay home. Mother wrote all of Karens profile info and
made her pose for a photo without the rest of us in it. None of us had been photographed
alone since the second of us was born and the rest followed soon after. We had forgotten she
was a thing with four limbs; we thought we were the same thing with twenty-four limbs.
A few suitors came over three days after Karens profile posted. The rest of us wore
matching dresses and served them snacks. Her dates found us to be overwhelming. Karen
didnt seem to mind but Mother posted a disclaimer on Karens profile soon after that read,
Dont let me huge family drive you away, haha! and then she proceeded to list all of the
sisters positive attributes. When the next suitor came over, we were banned from the
kitchen where Karen and the man were drinking tea. Mother even dismissed herself from
the kitchen despite her hope that Karen would consummate with no one until her wedding
night and generally did not allow her daughters to be alone with anyone of the opposite sex.
By the time Karen was nineteen, she was engaged to a man whose name was something
common but difficult to remember. She asked us to make her wedding dress as well as five
bridesmaid dresses. Mother was worried because we had never made anything delicate in
our entire lives but she conceded after our wailing and crying subsided.
We sewed the dresses out of the fabric from our old clothes; we arranged buttons like
gems all over each dress so we would be one swath of deepening color down the line of bride
and brides maids, Karens dress covered in ivory buttons and the rest of them in varying
shades of yellow, getting richer and brighter until the line ended in our youngest sisters
dress that was a sort of honey gold.
The night before the wedding, none of us could sleep so we all, together with Karen,
began knitting a veil. We knit for twelve straight hours. We did not let Mother come in the
room where we worked the morning of the wedding. She decided not to fight this battle. She
thought she would give us a few more hours in our hive. We would be divided soon anyway
and she took pity on us.
The groomsmen were confused when we did not come out of the room to walk down the
aisle with them but we told them to go from behind the closed door. We said we would
escort our sister down the aisle. We didnt have a father to give her away. No father would
have ever had to authority to do so anyway. Our sister was ours.
53

When we emerged from the dressing room into the backyard where all the guest sat in
white chairs beneath the flowered arbor, no one seemed to know what to say as we emerged
in our patchwork-lace cocoon, our hive with our sister-queen at the center. All six of us
stitched inside, a tangle of hair and teeth and button dresses, saying quietly under our
breath, The vows. The vows are not for you. A soft hum hovered over the spectators and
we could not tell if it came from within us.




54

08.
How to Survive a Car Accident
by Richard Chiem





Say yes when James invites you to L.A. with him for a weekend. Ask what kind of people
are going to be there. Walk with your hands in your pockets and realize that you dont know
James very well. Feel a warm and mutual respect because you have read his poems in class
before and liked the one about the boy who eats a mocking bird. Have conversations about
life and death and joke about it. Ask how did that topic come up in the first place. Comment
on his black fedora, that you think you like black fedoras.
Meet Jenny in a vacant parking lot, still blue colored from morning light. Look at her in
the eyes because she is important to you. Lay on the roof of the car waiting for James in
front of his house. Listen to Wu Tang Clan vibrate the metal of the roof youre laying on.
Imagine sitting inside a plane when one flies overhead. You could hear the drug-induced
non-anxiety coating Jamess voice when he wonders where his keys are.
Take the I 5 North towards L.A. / San Bernardino. Sit shotgun and get assigned to be
DJ. Listen to the calming clicks from your iPod. Take peppermint gum from Jenny.
Acknowledge you have never done anything with these two friends before. Jenny appears
glowing while driving. James in the backseat sinks into the cushion, closes his eyes.
Open and close windows. Talk about past relationships and laugh in unison during
sexual parts. Get distracted with other passengers on the highway. Imagine relationships
with those that make eye contact with you. Try, and remember Mary in a positive way and
cut wind with your hand through your open window.
Play Bon Iver. Light a cigarette to share around with everyone else in the car. Take
55

unconscious drags of smoke.
Slowly pass a sixteen wheeler semi truck on your right hand side. Listen to Skinny
Love. Notice a car up ahead swerving into your lane. Watch the car swerve back quickly to
its own lane. Exhale when Jenny reacts and turns the steering wheel closer towards you.
Hold the armrest while your own car swerves out of control. Notice how calm your breath is.
Let things happen. Swerve into the semi on your right. Crash with the momentum of the
cabin and everything behind you. Close your eyes. Duck somehow. The roof above you caves
down and down again. The noise is tremendous. Glass shatters and rains in small bits and
pieces and falls on top of yours and your friends jeans.
Realize the car is stuck underneath the semi. Get dragged underneath while the semi is
braking on the the I 5 North.
Lose your glasses. See blurry and near sighted. Leave the car through Jennys drivers
side door and keep walking away. Feel a strange urge to keep walking away. Resolve to baby
steps. Jenny is ahead and James is behind you. Ask if everyone is okay with your mouth.
Hear your friends say your name a few times. Watch Jenny cover her own mouth.
Experience your blood filming down your cheeks. They say you are the only one injured.
Lay on the hot pavement in front of the truck. Realize you are still chewing your gum,
while cars are still passing by. When James starts asking you questions about Bon Iver,
notice the softness in his voice and know he is trying to keep you conscious. Chew the stale
gum and answer all his questions. Talk about everything you know about Bon Iver. Cover
your head with Jamess white dress shirt. Hear Jenny crying and gasping while she is
standing above you with her cell phone. Understand you have a gash. Say something weird,
like you are still chewing your gum.
Love your life. Think about fighting.
Say you are conscious when a man appears. Say thank you when the man identifies
he is a doctor, someone who had pulled over, dressed in civilian clothes. Say your name is
Richard and call him Brian. Say you are conscious when there are paramedics. Say you
feel no pain in your legs when they ask. Look up at moving clouds when they massage you
into a neck brace. Say you are conscious. This is the first time you have been inside an
ambulance, so remember everything. Love your life. Feel convinced you have no regrets.
Feel the ambulance drive away and the road beneath your back.
Ask how everyone else is doing. Notice how all the paramedics look at you in this way
56

while they apply tubes and pat you down. They all say good. Listen to them discuss how you
might be in shock.
Wonder if there is an imaginary clock somewhere inside you ticking. Stare at the
ceiling and listen to sirens. Imagine traffic around you opening up and clearing a path. Move
your fingers, move your toes inside your shoes.
Arrive safely to the hospital. Know without knowing you are going to be okay. Watch
the ceilings change as they guide you down hallways, double doors and elevators. Ask more
people how their days are. See smiles and feel touched you have the power to surprise them.
Hear more talks that you are in shock. Enter the emergency room become tired under the
lights and feel less conscious. Everyone wants you to stay with them. Listen to a
disembodied voice, from a doctor walking around with an IV tower, describe your body
parts. Your head has a gash. Your stomach is soft and supple. Realize your clothes are being
cut with scissors and stay still. Say your name is Richard. Ask where you are. Ask anything
you want to say, say anything you want to say.



Receive visits from nurses and common doctors. Slowly feel aches and strange pains in
broad places in your body. Learn Nurse Renee has been tending to you even when you were
unconscious. Feel empty without reason when Nurse Renee tells you everything is going to
be okay. Feel alive when she stays there with you for hours on a fold up chair. Your family
has been notified. On your head, there are nine staples and dried blood.
Experience bliss in isolating sounds and thoughts and moving your lips slightly. Say
you feel good. Ask where your friends are.
Leave the emergency room like nothing happened. Feel the sensation of being filmed
when hugging James and Jenny and your aunt who arrives from Newport Beach, who all
have been waiting for you in the waiting room. Look everyone in the eyes. Notice there are
no magazines. Say you are ready to go.
Suddenly turn around and watch Nurse Renee run through some double doors to hand
you a slip of paper. She says, Youll be needing this.
Read a prescription for Vicodin with her name and signature. Watch her shake your
hand and wait a moment before she leaves. Eat dinner at a Pho restaurant with your friends
57

and aunt in your hospital gown. Devour hot food and noodles. Talk all night and teach Jenny
and James how to say We almost died in American Sign Language.



Meet Mary in a parking lot, some place random in Santa Monica, and cringe when you notice
her new boyfriend. Feel like you should have died when Mary makes a few jokes about Post
Traumatic Stress Syndrome and caresses her new boyfriend near his thighs. Listen to The
Mountain Goats and remember you authored this mix tape for Mary and watch the highway
for hours. Enjoy affinity and human connection watching James sign We almost died with
his hands in the backseat with you. Listen to Mary joke more.
He says, We should have called someone else to pick us up from L.A.
Say everything is okay. Find bits of glass everywhere for days.
Get invited to a Halloween party. Go to the Halloween party and shake hands with
people you know and people you dont know. Say thank you when someone complements
you on your costume, on how how lifelike the wound appears. Say hello. Lip sync some songs
you like from the party. Sing the chorus. Rap Living life without fear. Twenty five carrots in
my baby girls ear. Rap Birthdays were the worst days. Now we sip champagne when were
thirsty. Say nothing when everyone repeats party and bullshit, while leaning against a
wall.
Laugh only when something is funny. When something is funny, remember to look
someone in the eye because you liked what they just said. You want them to know.


58

09.
The Day No One Died
by Spencer Madsen


'Mhm.' Amelia said, unbuttoning her shirt.
Dilan was nude except for his socks. 'I want to really make it happen though, I really
want to do it this time,' he said.
They kissed tonguelessly. Dilan on top of her. He sucked on her neck, then rested his
face against the pillow beside Amelia's head. He breathed loudly in her ear. Sex was quieter
than six months ago, when they first started dating. Amelia listened to her moans like they
were a commercial on the radio.
Afterward, Dilan continued his thought while Amelia rolled a cigarette.
'I just don't want to forget anymore, you know.'
'Yeah.'
'The trick of possessions is they give you the illusion of immortality,' Dilan said. 'They
make you forget that you're going to die. They make you think you own this, you are this
thing's god and gods live forever.'
Amelia had the cigarette between two fingers and lit it with a Zippo that belonged to
her dad.
'And it's like, we spend a third of our life asleep. But we know that the eight-hour
cycle is a construct, humans don't have a natural sleep cycle. There are all these different
cycles that would increase our efficiency and decrease the time we waste sleeping, and it's
likethat's just one way I could be better, just one thing I could do.'
Amelia counted the freckles on the back of her right hand.
'And you know,' Dilan continued, 'I really hate it when you smoke.'
59

A fog flooded out of her mouth, like grade school at recess.
'You're putting my health at risk when you do that. It's selfish.'
Thirty-two freckles on right. She began counting her left.
'Anyway I'm just tired of this sort of idea that life is a narrative, that it's cohesive and
meaningful and linear. You know that sort of 'be yourself' spiel? It's likeit's impossible not
to be yourself. Who else are you going to be? Even if you're imitating someone, you're still
you doing an imitation. So how can you be anyone but yourself? How? As if we're this
divided thing, we have this self that requires nurture and cultivation and then this
potentially-abusive boyfriend thats responsible for all the nurture and care that the fragile
self needs.' He paused, exhaled a long breath, and said 'And, well, I don't know, maybe some
of that's true, the sort of meta-cognitive idea. I guess it has to be for the idea to even exist,
right? Like, isn't that that division of self the same thing as self-awareness?'
Forty-six on left, with two large freckles on her ring finger. She had more than last
summer.
Dilan went on. 'It's just so condescending, know yourself, like we need this inner-
emotional masturbation. And what it presumes, too, is that you aren't really responsible for
your actions, you know, like if you really know yourself, and you think I'm a selfish person,
then it's no longer your responsibility to treat others well, because its just part of who you
are. You know?'
With the first cigarette waning between her lips, Amelia began rolling another.
'Babe?' He said.
Do freckles go away, she wondered.
'Can you stop smoking for a second?'
They come from exposure to the sun, right? Would sunscreen help?
'Are you even paying attention?'
She reached for her laptop.
'Amelia,' he said, the name losing its meaning.
She opened the web-browser and began to search 'How to get rid of freckles.'
Dilan stared at her.
One good solution, a website suggested, is to choose a foundation between the color of
the freckles and the surrounding skin. Another is to try lemon juice.

60

10.
Okay
by Matthew Donahoo


It was late March and there was a foot of snow on the ground. This made everyone
depressed. Depressed in a selfish, impersonal waya coldness that seemed ideal and distant,
like a photograph of the Titanic. People would spend time together until they didnt feel like
being near each other anymore, go back to their apartments and use the internet, talk on
aol instant messenger.



Abigail was taking her lunch break. On her lunch breaks she would walk outside and sit in
her car. Her car was very old and didnt work well. Whenever someone saw her car for the
first time, Abigail would introduce it to the person. She would say, My car is really shitty.
We are the same age. Abigails car was made the same year that Abigail was made.
It was dark during her lunch break, of course. She worked at night! Abigail almost
always took her lunch break at 1:40 a.m. Sometimes she would smoke cigarettes.
Abigail walked from her car to the office building where she worked. The moon was
bright and slivered. There were two stars near the moon. Abigail recognized these as
planets. She stopped walking and looked at the sky then at the cars in the parking lot. She
counted them. Seven cars. She knew there were at least eight people inside the office
building. Abigail felt at home in parking lots. She often thought, Parking lots are the Great
Plains of our generation, though she never said it to anyone.
Abigail sat at her cubicle and opened the front compartment of her backpack. Inside
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were nine stolen pens, three stolen markers, a stolen pack of spearmint gum, stolen dental
floss, stickers that a website had sent her years ago, antidepressants she had been
prescribed, stolen organic hand sanitizer, and stolen beauty products. Almost everything in
this backpack was stolen, even the backpack was stolen! Abigail took a stolen pack of
cigarettes and a stolen lighter from her pocket and placed them in the compartment with
the other things. She removed the antidepressants and swallowed one with a mouthful of
coconut water from a bottle on her desk.
Abigail hadnt eaten for three days. She no longer found food to be appetizing. Abigail
knew this was worrisome, but she let it be. She liked the recklessness of it. It seemed poetic
to her. She had almost memorized a story in which the author described how one feels while
going without food for five days. The story ended with the author telling the reader that she
had never gone longer than five days without food. Abigail felt scared about that. She
wondered if she would be able to eat again. She thought maybe she would die but that it
would be okay because everything dies and what does it matter, really.
Abigail read celebrated contemporary fiction and interpreted phone calls for deaf
people. She did this three nights per week. She was paid well and was often asked to leave
early due to lack of business. She found that to be ideal. She would read and send emails to
people and listen to conversations, typing them out. If she found herself bored, she would
ask to leave and would usually be able to. Abigail sometimes wanted to quit her job, for no
discernible reason, but then she would imagine finding a new job and feel afraid and think
to herself, Maybe later. Abigail was very good at her job.
Abigail didnt like being interrupted while reading. Though when she was able to read
uninterrupted she would feel alone. She would feel lost. She would finish reading something
and look up and see no one and feel confused, like she did when she was young and would be
walking in a grocery store or mall with her mom while looking at the floor and her feet and
then look up to see that her mom wasnt there, that she had walked somewhere else. Abigail
hated that feeling but she didnt know what to do about it.
Sometimes Abigail would be sitting at work and she would be reading something good
and Stephen would walk past her. She would think, He should be impressed by what I am
reading. He should be impressed that I am reading.
Stephen had a small poster of The Vitruvian Man in his cubicle but instead of the Man
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there was Spider-Man. Abigail thought this was stupid. Stephen made more money than
Abigail made. She didnt care about this. She never spoke to Stephen unless she had to call in
sick.
Abigail was 22 years old. She was fit and lithe and had light brown hair that seemed
manic and flecked with grey when it wasnt pulled back. She wore the same fitted sweater
almost every day.
Abigail liked to take drugs. She preferred hallucinogens but they didnt seem to be as
available as other kinds. Abigail mostly ate antidepressants and smoked pot. She would
smoke pot and take long showers or eat antidepressants and work on things. Abigail felt
good doing both of those things, seemed to forget other things that made her feel bad.
Whenever she did have hallucinogens, Abigail would eat some then walk to a train station
near her house, ride the train downtown, and watch movies at a theater. She found it was
always a highly affective experience. She had once watched a documentary, after ingesting
mescaline, about a chimpanzee who spoke sign-language. She had left the theater in tears.
During Abigails second year of college she would ride the bus from school to her
apartment, late at night, after working hard on things during the daylight hours. She liked
the way buses looked at night. Their fluorescent lights seemed eerie and warm. She would
pretend she was in a Gus Van Sant movie. She wasnt sure if Gus Van Sant had ever filmed
something in a bus. She listened to dramatic readings of Walt Whitman poems and stared at
the faces of passengers. There were usually a lot of Asian people on the bus at night, going
from school to the city. She liked the way Asian faces looked. They looked tired. Abigail felt
tired.
Abigail would read poetry for pleasure. She kept a blog that catalogued all of the things
she read and she would look at it, late at night, in her bedroom, while feeling intense
interest and satisfaction. She would sometimes consider telling other people about the blog
but then remember that there was no one for her to tell.
When Abigail was 10 she went on a trip with her father to Florida and when they
returned her father drove her straight from the airport to her mothers house. Abigail was
writing a report on Florida for school. When they were approaching Abigails mothers
house, Abigails father said, Have I ever told you about the birds and the bees? Abigail said
no. She felt surprised and a little embarrassed. Abigails father said, Hmm I thought I had
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told you. Well, Ill tell you. A man gets an erection. That is when his penis becomes hard. You
know what a penis is? Well, he gets an erection and puts it into a womans vagina. You know
what a vagina is. This is a very sacred thing, it is not funny. Then the man ejaculates. That is
when stuff comes out of his penis. Abigail nodded solemnly. Her face was red. She
wondered what the reason they went to Florida was.
Abigail didnt talk to anyone. She had few friends and they were always busy. Abigail
mostly stayed in her room when she wasnt at school or at work. Sometimes she would feel
unable to stay in her room and so she would drive her old car around. Sometimes she would
smoke pot in her car while driving around. Once she drove to another state without
meaning to. She felt proud of this.
Abigails roommate was boorish. She was large and seemed to belong to a fraternity,
though that was impossible, Abigail thought. Abigail never spoke to her roommate. Only
occasionally, when Abigail left her room to go to school or work or to drive around, she
would pass her roommate in the living room and her roommate would announce how much
the rent was for that month and Abigail would say, Okay, and then walk out the door.
Abigail always felt tense after this happened.
Abigail valued few things. She had thrown most of her possessions into a dumpster
outside of her apartment during a period of extreme depression. Before throwing the things
out, she had organized them into piles. She had taken one or two piles out to the dumpster
each night between 3 and 4 a.m. on three consecutive nights. After completing this process,
Abigail didnt feel better or worse. She simply felt that she had done something and that she
was finished doing it.
Abigail now had three boxes in her room. One box contained her clothes. Another
contained books and tools. The last box contained sentimental things that had been mailed
to her by people she liked. In this box were almost all of the things that Abigail cared about.
It was mostly junk. Scraps of paper and boxes, envelopes. She loved all of them. Many of the
things in the box had driven Abigail to tears. She kept this box in her closet because she
hated looking at it. Each time she looked at it she felt overwhelming emotion. Abigail was
afraid of that. She was afraid that it would change her perception of the things in the box.
Oh that would be sad, she thought.
Once, after one of her classes, a boy asked Abigail if she would like to walk with him
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while he stole copy paper. Abigail said yes. She liked this boy. She had no romantic interest
in him although she did find him attractive. He was thin and fierce and funny, with careless
short brown hair. He wore a dark sweater over a blue, faded oxford shirt and slacks. They
walked to a copy machine and the boyhis name was Charleslooked busy while waiting for
someone to be finished using it, the copy machine. Abigail opened the front compartment of
her backpack and removed the bottle of antidepressants. She took one for herself and
offered another to Charles. Charles asked what it was and Abigail softly said something, then
loudly said it was an antidepressant. Charles said, Oh, thank you! and ate it. Charles stole
copy paper by putting it in his bag and they walked together out of the building.
Outside, Charles talked about what he was going to do for the rest of the day. Abigail
listened and then told him what she would be doing that day. She mentioned that she didnt
have any drugs left and that she was disappointed by that. Charles excitedly offered to share
his drugs with her. Abigail agreed, gladly. They walked to her car. Abigail turned, walking
sideways, and said, My car is really shitty. We are the same age. Charles laughed and said,
Oh, its fine. Are you really the same age? They drove together, in the old car, to Charles
apartment.
In Charles apartment they sat together on his couch. The apartment was really one
long room with slight protrusions from the wall meant to divide the kitchen, the living
room, the bedroom. Abigail liked the apartment. She wished it was hers. Charles went to
prepare drugs while Abigail looked at his bookshelf. There were a lot of books that Abigail
liked on this bookshelf. She trailed her fingers across the spines of the books. Almost all of
the spines were broken. Abigail liked that. It shows they have been used, she thought, It
shows that other people have held these things, have read them, have synthesized the
information within them. Those people are probably still alive, doing things with the
information held in these books stored in their brains.
Charles returned to the couch with two pieces of toast spread with coconut butter that
had been infused with hash oil. Charles told Abigail what it was. Abigail said, Thank you,
Charles. Charles looked at Abigails face and quietly, enthusiastically said, Hell yea,
homie! then took a bite of his piece of toast. They looked toward a wall while they ate, both
of them looking in the same place but not on purpose.
65

11.
The Mill Pond
by xTx


All of my tank tops are striped the wrong way for a girl of my size. They are also too short.
My belly bulges out from beneath the bottom like, "Hey, wanna play with me?" My corduroy
pants are also striped, but in the fabric. That is how they are made. My hair hangs like
greasy blanket fringe. I feel like a stripe. I am a stripe. A big bulging stripe painted down the
middle of a highway by a drunk highway stripe painting guyprobably my dad.
My mom won't buy me new tank tops because she thinks forcing me to wear tops that
are way too small for me is motivation for losing weight. I don't tell her that the only
motivation it is giving me is to put on my shortest tank top, go out in the backyard to my old
playhouse and kill myself with her sewing scissors.
"We can go shopping for some new clothes when your belly fits back inside, Tinker."
She says this in a voice that I would like to punch. Also, it is hard to judge an infant, I know,
but there should be laws against naming your baby daughter Tinkerbell if the baby's father's
family has a history of obesity. Seven pounds, two ounces at birth turning into 160 at age
thirteen on a 5'2" frame is a recipe for misery. "Bertha" would've been kinder.
The tank tops belong to last summer. My belly belongs to this summer. My mom won't
buy me new tank tops because she is cheap and also poor so she is blaming it on me and my
belly. I wear my cords because I won't wear shorts because of my thighs. They are too wide
for the style of shorts they sell now. My thigh flab bulges out from the too tight leg holes. I
tried on a pair of light brown ones once and my thighs looked like upside down ice cream
cones. The flavor they looked like was a sort of watery peach strawberry swirl, like how if
those two flavors melted out on a white kitchen floor in long thick strips that looked exactly
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like my legs.
There is no way I am going to wear boys shorts or my mom's shorts. She actually told
me, "It's stupid to wear pants all summer, Tinker. Why don't you wear one of my old pairs?"
Then she held up a pair of jean shorts that looked like a perfect light blue square. I walked
out of the trailer and after the screen door slammed shut I heard her say, "What?" and then,
to herself, "I like them." I could picture her through the side of the trailer, holding them in
front of her, against her straight waist, a square on a square. I kicked a rock at the dog and
then walked to the Shop N Save to get a Suzy Q.
Even in my cords my thighs rub together. My pants don't wear out in the knees first.
Ever. And, if I ever ranwhich I never dosmoke would wisp from the hot friction,
especially in cords. Something about the raised stripes mixed with the valleys between
them. Air flow mixed with fusion energy or something. I think we learned about it in science
class but I sit in the back, in the corner, away from everything, not paying attention, so I
could be wrong. There is a window in the back of that classroom that looks out towards the
road. Across the road there is an old farm. Next to the farm there is a field. Behind the field
there is a row of trees. Behind the row of trees there is another field and then another row
of trees and then there is the mill pond. I go to the mill pond a lot and so when I sit in the
back of class and Mr. Lewis is teaching about fusion energy and molecules and things, I stare
out the window in the direction of the mill pond and his voice becomes cicadas.



I take the long way to the mill pond now. Last summer I would take the shortcut through
Mister Dean's property because it cuts out almost a mile. I'd duck through the broken part
in the fence that separates his property from the road and I'd follow the chicken wire
alongside his east garden until it hit his cornfields and then I'd walk through the widest row
until I came to the end of it and go through the fence and down to the dried riverbed before
following that to where the field for the mill pond started. If you kept going straight on the
riverbed, you'd get to the outside of town and that's where the Shop N Save was. Cutting
through Mister Dean's property was the quickest way for me to get to both of my favorite
places.
He'd always be out there in his garden. I'd hear him first. Whistling and humming,
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whistling and humming. He wore a ladies straw hat and it would bob above the tomato
plants like a lady was there picking the ripe ones.
I never really paid attention to Mister Dean and I didn't think he paid much attention
to me until one day he was just there leaning against a fence post like he was waiting for me.
"Your name's Tinkerbell, right?"
"Yes."
"Where you going all these times you walkin' 'cross my property?"
I didn't want to tell him the mill pond because I didn't want anyone to know about my
secret place so I just told him I was going to the Shop N Save to get a drink.
"I got a drink," he said. "I got Kool-Aid. Why don't you come up? It's hot."
I looked at Mister Dean and then I looked at the fence post and then I looked at my feet
and then the fence post and then Mister Dean again.
"You come up or you don't come 'cross my property no more."
And because I dreaded going the long way and because it was really hot and because I
didn't know what else to say, I came up.
And that's how I started having Kool-Aids with Mister Dean.
He had a real house with a porch that only had one chair. He would make me sit on the
chair and he would lean against the porch rail facing me or he would sometimes sit on the
stairs, sideways, so he could look at me. Mister Dean was about as old as my mom, I guessed.
I didn't like how I could always hear his breathing, this raspy gurgle. It never left him, even
when he was speaking. It made me think of the cicadas at the mill pond and how their buzz
never stopped, it just filled up the air like a jar. Mister Dean's breaths were like that but they
never became part of the everything so that eventually you didn't hear it anymore. His
shirts bunched funny in the back and I wondered if he hid black filmy cicada wings under
them.
I found out later he did not.



I don't know why they call it a mill pond because there is no mill. Maybe there was one there
back in the 1800's or something but now there is not. I sometimes walk around in the brush
around the mill pond looking for, like, relics of a mill. Ruins, I guess; pieces of something
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that used to be whole. Like old concrete slabs or stones or a broken turny-wheel for energy
making, like the ones on riverboats like they have on the Mississippi. Maybe some sort of old
chutes that look like playground slides, but rusted. Big wooden beams with iron spikes
sticking out of them. Big chunky things that look like they were put together with strong
hands that knew how to make things that would last forever. They'd be broken but still
strong. They would still look dignified, even though they were just old pieces of something
bigger.
The brush is high in places and where there is no brush, there are weeds. I have looked
as much as I can even though I might get bit by ticks or snakes. I just feel like I want to find
proof of something that I feel is true.
But I never do.



We drank the Kool-Aid out of jelly jars that were always dirty but I never said anything.
We'd sit on his porch and drink the Kool-Aid until it was gone. We would talk about things
that people talk about when they don't really have much to say to each other; water-
treading things. I looked at my Kool-Aid a lot; some days pink, some days red, some days
purple or blue. Sometimes he'd ask me how old I was even though I had already told him
before. Sometimes he'd look at me for a long while and then say, "Tinkerbell . . . " like he
was rolling my name around in his mouth and then he'd shake his head and laugh a little. He
mostly looked at me and did little nods. And breathe.
I must've said something about Suzy Q's once and one day he brought me one with my
Kool-Aid. I told him, "No, that's all right." And he said, "No girl, you go on. Eat it." And I said,
"No, I'd better not. My mom . . . " and he said, "Your mom, what?" And I didn't want to tell
him about how my mom won't let me eat sweets and how she hides all her cookies even
though I always find them and how I heard her on the phone telling her best friend Avery
how "Tinker's just gettin' so goddamn big." And, so, I just set that Suzy Q down on my thigh
for as long as I could, like it wasn't delicious, like it was a turd or a dead thing like I wasn't
sitting there wanting with every part of me to shove it right into my mouth. But after a
while, I did. I ate it. I ate the Suzy Q. I couldn't help it.
Mister Dean watched me eat the Suzy Q. How I unwrapped it and shook it out into my
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fist like it was a squeezed out pup. How I let the wrapper fall. How it blew across the dirty
porch wood and fell off the side. He watched how I took it with both my hands and pulled it
apart, slowly. How I listened to the quiet wet split of the cream pulling away. How I smelled
at it, the sweet chocolate scent erasing the faint cherry smell of Kool-Aid and the wet dirt
smell from his just watered garden. He watched as I placed one half down on my thigh,
cream side up and ate the other half with my eyes partly closed like when I was alone.
Shoving and chewing and swallowing until its length was gone and then licking each of my
fingers clean of its guts. Mister Dean watched me eat each half like he'd never seen anyone
eat anything before.
"You really like them things, don't you?" His breath, for once, sounded gone.
And I didn't answer because he already knew the answer.
"You want another one?" He asked me this in a voice meant for church.
And I didn't answer that question either and he didn't wait for it. He got up from the
stairs and disappeared into the house. When he came out he had the box. He leaned himself
against the porch railing, opened the box, got one of the little chocolate cream cakes, and
reached it out to me, just far enough to where I'd have to reach.
"Say please," he said.
I didn't want to, but then I did.
Mister Dean watched and then Mister Dean made me say please two more times.
Later on the only please I would say would be followed by the word, 'stop'.
On the Kool-Aid days, I'd never make it to the mill pond.



There is a little dock on the mill pond. There is a little row boat tied to the dock. I guess it
belongs to the farmer, but nobody uses it. It never moves. I know this because I put a rock on
it once. I put it in a wobbly place so if someone were to use it, it would surely fall. The rock is
still there. The rope that ties it has moss growing on it and a spider web that always stays
the same. The oars sit like an X in the belly of it. It might as well be on land.
After I am done looking for ruins, I lie on the dock, on my back, and pull my tank top
up to my boobies. I rub my belly in the sun. I pray nobody comes but I also hope they do.
Nobody ever does. Dragonflies land on the rowboat rope and then they fly away and then
70

they come back and then they fly away again. Sometimes they land on my knees. It's quiet
there. The water never moves. It doesn't really have a shore. Its outsides are mostly cattails,
and by the dock, lily pads. Every so often there are clear plops that break the hum of the
cicadas that like to do their buzz when it's so hot outside. Their buzz sounds like how the
sun feels hot. The wet frog plops are the only cool sound out there. The middle of the mill
pond is a perfect circle. The water is black like it refuses to reflect the sky or can't. From the
sky, looking down on the mill pond, I'm sure it looks like a big green eye-ball, the cattail
heads brown flecks in the green, its middle the shiny black pupil, staring up at the clouds.
Like me.
I think about falling into that black pupil sometimes. Untying the rope, disturbing the
spider web, falling the wobbly rock, and climbing into the belly of the boat. I have never
rowed anything, but I would figure it out and paddle through the iris of green cattails and
lily pads until I got to the pupil. I could lie on the boat for a while, there in the middle of the
pupil. Stare up into the sky with it; just me and the mill pond's pupil. The dragonflies would
find my knees and I would rub my belly in the sun. When I felt ready, I would stand up in the
boat. I'd stand there in my too short, too small striped tank top and my striped in the fabric
pants and my blanket fringe hair and I'd think about the ruins I could never find. I'd think
about how I knew what it was like to be a ruin. The cattails would watch and the cicadas
would hum their buzzy heat song and when I jumped into the pupil's shiny black it would
make a cool plop sound like the frogs' do. On my way down I'd wonder if I would ever be
found and how nice it would feel to be looked for.


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12.
If I Could Be Sweet
by Lucy K. Shaw


I was bored one day last week, so I got dressed, walked down Lansdowne to Bloor, got on the
subway, read my book for six stops, alighted at St George, went upstairs to transfer to the
University line, waited four minutes for the train to come, casually took a bow, and jumped
right in front of it, to the horror of the most unfortunate strangers.
It was weird.
I thought I would be instantly smashed to pieces, but somehow the train went straight
over me, and except for the noise, it didnt hurt a bit. I was really just embarrassed.
Everybody was screaming and freaking out and I didnt know what to do, so to avoid the
awkward situation, I decided I would just pretend to be dead.
In the hospital, I was lying on a table and a couple of friends came in to identify the
body, which was nice of them. They lifted the sheet up and I opened my eyes and said, Oh
hi guys, which scared them at first, but then they said, Hey, whats up?
I made them promise not to tell anyone though, because I knew my insurance policy
covered me for a flight home, if I was dead, and I really missed my family. It could be good
for me, I thought, to indulge in some home comforts.
I said Id see my friends at the funeral, if they could afford to come. Then I was put into
a box and taken on to a plane, where I was placed clumsily in the hold with the luggage and
the cats in boxes. It wasnt comfortable but I supposed that I was in no position to complain.
It was free after all.
I arrived back in England without jet lag and was taken to my home town. The family
was surprised to see me looking so well and wanted to cancel the funeral arrangements. I
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said it seemed like a waste of all that food, and of course I wanted to see who would show up
and who would cry the loudest. I suspected it would be some wise guy who I never liked that
much to begin with, but really I had no idea.
I chose an open casket because I wanted a good view of the mourners and I knew that
some people would come just to see what I was wearing. I wanted a good view of them too. I
was planning on resurrecting sometime between the service and the party.
However, when the day came, it turned out to be a sad affair, but it was for all the
wrong reasons. Inexplicably, the thing took place in some village church that Id never seen
before. Some of the people who came, I didnt recognize at all because theyd gotten bald or
fat or both. All of the people who made speeches were the wrong people to make speeches.
Someone read a passage from On The Road which implied Id been a mad one and a few of
my college paintings were displayed around the church. Oh God, I thought. This really is
going to be embarrassing. The whole thing was such a disappointing cliche.
But everyone was so sad by the end of it that I felt like an absolute douchebag. I
decided maybe it would be better if I did just die.
Then it got really awkward because my friend sung a song hed written for the
occasion and I wanted to cry too. That was pretty much the only sincere part of the event. I
didnt though. I just fell asleep because it had been such a busy week and I couldnt
remember the last time Id gotten so much attention. I was exhausted.
Next thing I knew, I was being carried back down the aisle towards the cemetery and
my friend from the hospital was whispering in my ear, Hey! When are you going to wake
up?
Strange situation.
I was just about to tell her to forget all about it and bury me, when a song started
playing over the speakers. Of all things, The Sweet Escape by Gwen Stefani featuring Akon.
What is happening!? I whispered back.
She was dancing. You loved this song!
Im still alive!
Are you?
I was about to tell her what a ridiculous question that was, but I thought better of it.
Why are they playing this song? This is my funeral!
Well, what song did you want? You dont generally get to choose these things.
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I dont know! If it has to be a Gwen Stefani song, you could have at least chosen
something by No Doubt. End It On This, or something.
Oh, does anyone know you liked that one?
Stop talking about me in the past tense!
Sorry. This is your funeral. Its confusing. What song did you want?
I always sort of thought Id get Some Fantastic Place by Squeeze.
We talked about that. We decided it was inappropriate.
What? Why?
Well, thats about a woman dying from cancer.
So?
Well, you jumped in front of a train because you were bored, and youre not actually
even dead.
Nobody knows that though! Do they?
No, but still. It seemed disrespectful. Somebody suggested Taking Back Sunday, but I
said that youd grown out of that a long time ago.
What song was it? Slowdance On The Inside? That could have been ok!
I think it was called, What It Feels Like To Be A Ghost?
Are you kidding me!?
No?
I never even liked that album! I was 19 when it was released. I was over them by
then.
Oh.
And why didnt anybody read out something that Ive written? That would have been
more appropriate, dont you think?
Well, youve never published anything. Nobody really knows about any of it.
You do!
Well, Ive been busy. Ive got school and stuff You dont get to curate your own
funeral. Its just not how it works. You can do whatever you want when youre alive, but this
stuff is left up to everyone else. You dont get to choose how youre remembered.
This was terrible news. I realized that if I was going to be buried there and then, I
wasnt going to be remembered at all. Sure, a few close friends would say things like,
Remember that poem she wrote about doing things? And for a while they would, but
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eventually itd get lost in their computers and my blog would get taken off the internet and
my clothes would go back to Value Village and nobody would really think about me at all,
except people I went to school with who, when they were drunk, would say, Remember that
weirdo who jumped in front of a train? and another one would reply, Yeah, she was
always a weirdo.
But nobody else would realize Id ever been alive in the first place! I had misjudged the
situation very badly.
Pssst We were almost outside the church. I peeked out and saw the hole in the
ground where I was supposed to be buried. Pssst. I cant do this. I cant do this now! Can
you do me a favor?
My friend loved me but she was getting tired of all the drama.
You jumped in front of a train. You wanted to die. Are you sure you dont want to be
buried now and be done with it?
I started to panic.
Theres a difference between wanting to die and wanting to be dead! I said, a little
too loudly. The song was still playing though and Akon was in full cry. Nobody noticed.
I know that, she said. Thats why people get drunk.
She had a point. Sometimes people do just need a break from the mundane notions of
every day life. It doesnt necessarily mean you have to stop living.
Listen! I told her. I need you to do me a favor. If you can distract everyone, Ill get
out of this coffin, go hide in the bathroom and you can bury the box without me in it. Then
Ill just move away, start a new life, delete my Facebook and everything Nobody will have
to know.
It doesnt work like that, love!
She wasnt exactly thrilled by my escape plan but I didnt know if I could face revealing
myself anymore. I felt like a prize idiot.
Do you think Gwen Stefani will make another solo record? I asked.
What?
Do you think shell make another solo album? I mean, I really liked the first one, had
lots of good times with it. There were some really great tracks. What You Waiting For is one
of the best pop songs of the 21st century, in my opinion but the second album, this was
just about the only good song. Well, and Early Winter. And 4 In The Morning
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What are you talking about?
And now No Doubt has gotten back together and I havent heard any of their new
stuff, assuming theyve got some, and shes got at least one kid, and a fashion line, so I dont
know if shell ever do another one, shes pretty old now too What do you think?
She was very stressed, and probably tired from carrying my coffin around too.
I have no idea. Shouldnt you be thinking about whether or not you want to die?
We were in the cemetery by this point.
Im thinking about whether or not I want to live.
Then why are you talking about Gwen Stefani?
I dont know. I was just thinking about the possibilities.
What?
Well, I mean, if Gwen Stefani makes another solo record and Im dead, I wont get to
hear it.
Is that it? Is that all you care about? Youre not even that much of a Gwen Stefani
fan.
Theyre playing her song at my funeral.
You just said you didnt want them to!
She was right. I wasnt making any sense. I tried to think about why Id tried to kill
myself in the first place. Boredom didnt seem like much of a reason. I could have just gotten
a hobby or something instead. And besides, since all this had happened, I hadnt been bored
once. It had actually been quite exciting.
I realized that more than anything, I was just tired. I was tired of getting up every day
and brushing my teeth and putting on clothes and going about my business, filling up the
hours of the day until it got dark, when Id start to unwind and maybe drink a glass of
wine or a can of beer and write something to make somebody think about something and get
into bed and lie there feeling dissatisfied for a while until I fell asleep, woke up and did it all
again. It was all pretty tiring stuff.
Time to make up your mind, she told me.
A crowd had gathered around the burial plot. I could see that we were at the top of a
hill and the views of the countryside surrounding the churchyard were pretty fantastic. This
wouldnt be such a bad place to spend eternity, I thought. Maybe this is the right decision
for me. Maybe Im just causing these people more harm than good.
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Maybe theyll be better off without me. Maybe it doesnt matter if Gwen Stefani makes
another record.
I really wasnt sure.
They started to lower me into the ground and I caught a moment of eye contact with
my friend. She gave me a last look and I realized I felt ok with it. It was time to go.
Id heard that there is a great sense of peace just before a person dies and it seemed
like it was true. I felt nothing except weightlessness, acceptance and forgiveness. I took a
deep, last breath and prepared for my fate. I was drifting off into the realms of semi-
consciousness when I heard my friend speak again.
Id like to read something, if thats ok something of hers. Something that she wrote.
I think she would have liked me to do that for her.
Shes come good, I thought. She understands how important this is to me. I was so
happy. She was going to take care of my legacy. I would be remembered. I would make a
difference.

What a chore to be unforgettable
too forgivable for any ones own good
Non, je ne regrette rien huh?
Well, hey, maybe

Oh my God, I screamed, bolting upright. What are you doing? Thats not finished! What
the hell are you doing!? She was reading from a poem Id been writing about my broken
heart. It wasnt ready. She knew it wasnt ready.
I felt wild. I stood up in the grave and roared at her. I dont even know what I said or
where she was. I was so angry, I just howled and threw my arms in the air and kicked the
side of my own coffin.
Collectively, the crowd gasped. Then they stared at me in a stunned silence. All of them
standing up around the grave, and me in the wooden box, six feet below them. I
felt minuscule. It was outrageous. I was back from the dead. I was ridiculous. I searched her
out in fury and rage. I couldnt believe she had done this to me. She had meant what she had
said about not being able to choose how youre remembered. I was going to choose. I still
had the chance to choose.
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Our eyes met. I could have killed her.
None of this made sense to me anymore. We held the gaze for almost a minute. My
blood boiled and boiled. My fists were clenched. I wondered if maybe I had been killed by
the train after all. Surely this wasnt real. Surely none of this could have been reality.
Then for a while, nothing happened except the passing of time. My anger peaked and
slowly I started to make some order out of the chaos. I felt the blood flow out of my face, and
around my body and I started breathing again. Suddenly I understood that she had saved
me. Shed pulled me back.
I looked around at everything and I started laughing.
Her face broke into a smile, then she winked. We were both laughing.
I didnt know what to do. I didnt understand why anybody was there. What were they
thinking? What was I doing? I tried to control my laughter. I smiled politely and hoisted
myself out of the ground. The moment dragged on forever. It was so stupid. Nobody else
moved. I was cackling like a witch. The whole thing was ludicrous. I couldnt remember the
last time Id felt so alive.
Finally, I stood up at ground level and still nobody spoke, they just stared at me as
though theyd seen a ghost. I think that was my favorite part. I nodded to them and smiled
again. I realized it was all sort of perfect. Thank you for coming, I told them before I
turned away, and ran off into the fields.
She came running with me, down the hill. It wasnt finished. I wasnt finished. I
definitely wasnt finished. SWEET ESCAPE! I yelled out, running faster than Id ever run
before in my whole life.
Sweet escape.

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13.
Sweet Potatoes
by Timothy Willis Sanders


I PRESSED THE GAS. Pocket Full of Stones played on my stereo. I pressed the brake. Pimp C
was rapping. I thought, Cant believe this dudes dead. I rapped with Pimp C. A woman in a
Rav 4 looked over. I pressed the gas. I looked at fields while Bun B rapped. I pressed the
brake. I looked at cows and wondered if I should call my mom be- fore or after turkey. I
imagined her and Bill eating cheeseburgers and drinking orange drink.
I saw a sign for Texaco and exited. My throat was sore. Three and a half hours in
traffic. I subtracted the hours and said, Two to go. I bought Vitamin Water and Peanut
M&Ms. I looked up the weather in Oklahoma. There was a 80% chance of thunderstorms.
There was a tornado warning in effect until 8 p.m. I imagined a wall cloud and hail. I
imagined my mom turning on KFOR and watching the doppler radar. I looked at the road
and thought Maybe another hour and a half.
I turned on the radio and found NPR. I didnt hear the title of the show. The words
inspirational and human took listeners to commercial. The commercials were for a life
insurance company and an investment firm Id never heard of. The host said, LaVon is
determined to achieve his dreams despite the odds. I tried to look for lights on the horizon.
It was past 8 p.m. I was like, Im a get where I wanna be, said LaVon, and that place is the
NFL. I looked at the radio. I looked at the road. The host said, Just when everything was
going for himhe had a home, a job, a school, teammates, friendstrouble found LaVon
again. I put my hand on my forehead. I rubbed my forehead. Man, it was like my whole
world fell apart, said LaVon. I rubbed my eyes and thought, Goddammit. I remembered
playing football in the fourth grade. Something happened and the coach kicked me off the
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team. I can handle this. Thiss going to be okay, said LaVon. I turned the station. Wasted
by Gucci Mane was playing. I said, Cant believe this dudes in jail.
I rubbed my eyes. I imagined the portal from the movie Stargate. The Stargate portal
was blue and spit lightning bolts. I imagined driving through the Stargate portal and
arriving at Sarahs parents house three hours ago. I imagined Sarahs parents smoking
weed. I laughed because I couldnt imagine Sarahs parents smoking weed. I laughed more
and thought, If I drove through a portal, how do I know itd take me where I want to go? I
pressed the gas.



There was a giant skunk holding a mailbox on Sarahs parents street. I called Sarah.
Sarah, wheres the house?
Have you seen the skunk mailbox? said Sarah.
I just passed the skunk mailbox, I said.
Then turn around. Were right after the skunk mailbox, said Sarah.
I did a U-turn. I saw the skunk mailbox. I saw Arthur waving from the driveway. I
hugged Arthur and Sarah. Opie sniffed my shoelaces. I said hello to Opie and scratched
behind her ears.
Three hours, straight up stop and go, from Austin to Waco, I said.
Damn, really? Holidays dude, said Arthur.
Well theres plenty of stuff here to help you forget about the drive, said Sarah. I
walked into the house. Sarahs parents were smoking weed.
Hey, there he is! said Ben. Sarahs parents walked to the door. Ann held out her
hand. I shook Anns hand. Ben handed me a pipe. I took a hit.
Werent you supposed to be here earlier, said Ben.
We made food. Are you hungry? said Ann.
Herere your pillows and blankets for the couch. Wed give you the bed, but one of the
cats got locked in and peed all over everything, said Ben.
Veronica, my cat. You remember him? said Sarah.
Did you go up I-35? said Ben.
We have mashed potatoes, some pie. I could heat you up some pie, said Ann.
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I ate apple pie while Ben talked about Israel. I was too high to understand what Ben
was saying about Israel. I finished the apple pie and wondered if a tornado destroyed my
moms house. I thought, Will I call my mom before or after turkey?



I woke and there were three cats on me. One cat was awake. It looked at me and blinked. The
curtains were open and there was a lot of light. I heard water running in the kitchen. Ann
was humming a song. I thought, I can relax. I can let myself relax. I tried to go back to
sleep but there was too much light.
I looked at the bookshelf. There was a large blue book with the word HISTORY on the
spine. It was the only title I could read from the couch. I thought, What did Ben say about
Israel?
Ben came down the stairs. He scratched his beard. I closed my eyes and pretended to
sleep. I thought, No. I need to relax. I opened my eyes and said Gmornin in a folksy way.
Oh, I hope youre not allergic. Thats Veronica, Silverfox, and I dont know that one,
said Ben. He nodded at the cat on my knees. He came in and beat up Boxer and kind of
stuck around, said Ben.
The cat on my knees looked at Ben. She seemed to be waiting for Ben to do something.
I smiled.
Its okay. I like cats, I said. I remembered my mom coming home with Wishbone. I
wanted to hold him but he kept running everywhere.
A dog walked into the room. The dog looked at Ben.
Boxer, said Ben. Boxer looked at me, then at the three cats, then at Ben. Ann walked
in the room.
Good morning. Do yall want breakfast? Theres granola, yogurt, we have some cereal
too, said Ann.
You want to eat now. Were not going to the grandparents until noon or so, said Ben.
I can make some toast. No eggs though, said Ann.
Toast is good. Thank you, I said. I thought Grandparents? I imagined them refusing
to eat with me. I imagined them talking shit about Barack Obama. I smelled weed. I thought,
Its like nine in the morning. Ben handed me the pipe. I took a hit. Ben talked about
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Harry Truman. Ann set down a plate of toast, blackberry jam, butter, a yogurt cup, orange
juice, coffee, and cream. I ate and listened to Ben. If Harry Truman had gotten off the farm
maybe he wouldve made better decisions about Israel.
Arthur came downstairs. He suggested we go out to the pond. I opened the Weather
Channel app on my iPhone. It was 57 degrees and sunny in Oklahoma. I thought about
Googling Oklahoma + tornado to see if the storm hit near my parents house. I imagined
my stepdad inspecting cracks on the windshield of his Yukon. Ben opened the back door.
Boxer, Veronica, Silverfox, and the other cat ran outside.
We walked to the pond. I took pictures of the sun on the pond with my iPhone. Arthur
took photos of Ben and Sarah. Sarah walked Opie. Bensat on a tree stump and looked at the
pond. Boxer sniffed trees. A small dog walked to Boxer. Boxer went to sniff the small dog.
The small dog jumped and ran away. Opie stared at Boxer and the small dog.
Whose dog is that? I said.
Thats Mitzi, said Sarah. The neighbors dog.
The people with the skunk mailbox, I said.
Yeah. The husband is an exterminator, said Sarah.
I thought they only dealt with bugs. Why the skunk? I said.
Its the country. Theres bugs, and then theres vermin, said Sarah.
Mitzi yelped at Boxer. Boxer began growling and trying to bite Mitzi. Boxer! said
Ben. Boxer, get over here. Boxer walked to Ben. Boxer looked calm. I took out my iPhone. I
Googled Oklahoma + tornado. The page took a long time to load. I turned off my iPhone. I
imagined Wishbone flying through the air.



I looked at houses as they passed. I thought So huge. Arthur was playing Mingus and Pike
by The Ruby Suns. I wondered if Sarahs grandparents would be nice. I wondered if they
would smell weed on us. I wondered if they smoked weed. I decided to call my mom after
turkey. Opie sat in my lap. I stroked her ear and looked at the houses.
Arthur turned right. The road was dirt. Opie stood in my lap and looked outside. She
perked her ears. Opie licked her nose. There were flowerbeds next to the road. There were
cows beyond the flowerbeds. I thought So huge. We parked. I got out and sat Opie down.
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Were here, said Sarah. This is nice, I said. An old man walked to meet us. He
wore a red sweater vest. He smiled and hugged Sarah, Ben, Arthur, Ann. He shook my hand.
Grandpa, you remember Keith, said Sarah.
Yes, how are you doing? Happy Thanksgiving, said Sarahs grandpa.
Happy Thanksgiving to you. This is a great place, I said.
Thank you. Lets go and get everyone a drink, said Sarahs grandpa. We walked
inside. I walked close to Arthur.
I dont remember Sarahs grandparents, I said.
From the wedding. You never notice old people, said Arthur.
All old people look alike.



There were plates on the kitchen island. There were green beans, mashed potatoes,
asparagus, stuffing, carrots, cranberry sauce, three pies, rolls, and truffles topped with
bacon. I stared at the food and looked for sweet potatoes.
Turkeys not ready yet. Lets drink! said Sarahs grandpa.
Keith, white or red? said Ben.
Oh, white, I guess, I said.
Not a wine man. Want a beer?
No, Ill have white, I said.
White it is, said Ben.
Ben poured a glass. I took the glass and sat on the couch. I looked at Opie. Opie was
staring at two cats. The cats stared at Opie. The cats sniffed at Opie. Sarahs grandpa sat in a
chair. Sarahs grand- ma sat in another chair. Sarah and Arthur sat on the couch. Ben and
Ann did things in the kitchen. I thought All couples here. Sarahs grandpa asked about
Sarahs iPhone. Sarah handed her iPhone to him. Sarahs grandpa poked at Sarahs iPhone.
Sarahs grandma told Sarahs grandpa not to break Sarahs iPhone. I wondered when the
turkey would be done. I looked at the results of my Google search. A tornado touched
Bethany. Three people were dead. They found a woman in a tree. Opie yelped. Arthur stood
up. The cats hissed at Opie. The cats smacked Opie with their claws and jumped away.
Arthur grabbed Opie and sat with her on the couch. The cats stared at Arthur. I was glad my
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mom didnt live in Bethany. I decided to call her after turkey. I imagined a woman in a tree
without leaves.
We said a prayer and passed dishes. There were no sweet potatoes. I remembered my
moms sweet potatoes. There were melted marshmallows on each yam. I remembered a
work potluck where my co-worker Dario refused to eat someones cornbread. I only eat my
momma and thems cornbread, said Dario. I ate mashed potatoes. Ben talked about the
weather. The food is excellent, I said. I scooped more mashed potatoes on my plate. I
remembered the last time I visited my parents in Oklahoma. We all went to Golden Corral. In
front of the Golden Corral a sign read Endless Babyback Ribs.
Ben cleared the table. Okay so we have pecan, apple, and pumpkin pie, said Ben.
Who wants what? I rubbed my stomach. We ate pie and drank coffee. We put on coats and
walked to the porch. The sun was going down. I looked at the cows. I looked at the
flowerbeds. Sarahs grandparents sat in white rocking chairs. I smiled at Sarahs
grandparents. Their faces seemed happy. I took a picture of them with my iPhone. I dialed
the area code for Oklahoma. I looked at the area code for Oklahoma. I dialed the rest of the
number and walked inside the house.
Hey, Happy Thanksgiving.
Happy Thanksgiving.
What are yall doing?
Im watching TV. Bills messing around on the computer.
Did yall eat?
Yep.
What did yall eat?
Oh, Bill just made some burgers.
No turkey? Sweet potatoes?
No. You know us. Just a day off.
I miss those sweet potatoes.
Hmm.
We didnt have sweet potatoes. Even if we did I wouldnt eat it.
Ha. Hm.
Ill only eat the sweet potatoes you make. With the marshmallows.
Haha. Okay.
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Was the storm big last night? I heard about a storm.
It hit Bethany bad. They found some woman in a tree.
I read that! How sad.
Bless her heart. Thats why you have a storm cellar. Ha.
Hows Wishbone?
Good. Laying here. Spoiled rotten.
Okay. Love you mom. Tell Bill I love him.
Okay. We love you too.
I walked to the porch. Opie chased Arthur around a tree. Sarah took pictures. Sarahs
grandparents rocked back and forth.





85

14.
I Remember Waking Up and Kissing You, My Lips
Sticky from Sleep, on a Floor Covered with Other
Twenty-Somethings, a DVD Menu Looping Over and
Over on the Television, Getting Up Early and
Driving 30 Minutes to Work
by Michael Inscoe


01

The sun and the moon are both very visible in the sky.
I send you a text: Stab my fucking chest with a Sharpie and write your name on my
heart. What are you doing right now?
You respond, Did you see the news?
Come here, I respond.
I walk outside. Things seem fine because they always seem fine.
Things can only be fine because to suggest otherwise would be to reject logic.
The world is fine. Everything is fine.
I walk to buy some beer from a gas station close by.
Other people are looting at the gas station. The clerk seems depressed.
A man is on the phone with his wife, telling her he loves her and he wishes hed been
around more.
86

I walk home with the beer and sit on the porch drinking it.
The sky is blood red and you text me: Fuck the world, Lol.
I respond, What are you going to do tonight? Right now there is a sad teenager making
a playlist with only songs about ends for his girlfriend. I regret that I am not this teenager.

02

Where are you?

03

Its cold outside. There are dead birds everywhere.
I think about me, as a child, my fucking parents, my fucking brother.
We had a dog.
Theres a photo of me with my mom from when I was ten or eleven; were dressed the
same. Im grinning like an idiot and my mom is looking at something just past the photos
border, sort of half-grimacing.
I walk to the car and unlock the door.
I drive to work but its closed so I go back home.
I send you a text: The moon is melting and turning to blood; the sky is dark red; the
sun has exploded; should I update my Facebook status?
I drive home and the cat is sleeping on my bed.
I lie down next to it but it gets up and leaves the room.
The last time I saw you, you were dressed up for a dinner with your family. We drank
wine and looked through my roommates things.

04

When you bought those fake mustaches and we wore them all night and you kept calling
everything bitches, I remember at one point, late into the night, you straightened mine,
above my mouth, your face so close to mine, your hand and fingers.

87

05

I wake up so hungover and feeling really sad. I look at my phone. I turn my computer on and
look at the screen. I check my email and Facebook. Someone says something about how all
the oceans are turning to blood. There is blood everywhere.

06

Dead birds lying in gutters and floating atop seas of coagulated blood all thick and maroon
and black.

07

You sent me a text: No, Im not impossible to touch.

08

I taste something on my lips. My eyes are watering.
There are trucks outside and men working on the phone lines or the internet or
something.
The internet is working fine, I think.
I close my computer.
I send you a text.
I fall asleep.

09

When we were on the phone and I said, Think about it, theres actually no such thing as
tumbleweeds, and you sent me a photo of one and I said, Thats just a prop, and no one
noticed all the tumbleweeds in the world disappeared that night forever


88


15.
We Arent Really Supposed To Talk To Bears
by Ben Brooks


The window went that kind of black which means the nighttime is opening. I said, hello
nighttime, and started scratching my head. I scratch my head every day. There are a lot of
scabs on my head. Sometimes my head starts bleeding and seams of blood form under my
fingernails. When that happens I remember about being made from star stuff and I feel
tired. When that happens other people look at me like I shouldnt be there.
There arent many other people.
There are two other people.
There were more other people but they died from things like bad hearts, cancer, and
suicide. Bye bye other people. I dont believe that I will see them in heaven but sometimes I
see them when I am asleep. In my book about dreams it says that you can work out if you are
dreaming or not by pressing a light switch. If the light switch turns the light on then you are
not dreaming. There are never any light switches in my dreams.
At six I went into my kitchen and boiled water and made instant noodles. Instant
noodles are delicious. I eat them every day. They come in five flavours: beef, prawn, chicken,
mushroom, and vegetable. I never eat the prawn ones because prawns have eyes. Too
human. I chose mushroom. I sat on the soil in my garden and ate them. A fox came out of a
bush. I held out some noodles and said hello but it ran away. Nightnight, foxy.
My garden is just soil. It is ten sleeping lions long with brown fences on either side.
When my Grandma died the garden had some bushes and some grass in it but I telephoned a
man and he took it all away. I like my soil garden. There is nothing to break in it. There is
89

nothing in it which can die. When it rains my garden smells alive because the water goes
into the soil and wakes it up. Good morning, soil. How are you today?
My dinner was five gold stars. I ate every last noodle. I went inside and washed up my
bowl and played the no legs game. The no legs game is where I pretend I have no legs. I drag
myself all through the house using only my arms. Sometimes I get carpet burns. Sometimes I
moan to make it more realistic. Ahhhhhh. Watch out, I am coming, and I have no legs.
Ahhhhh. Im not really coming. There isnt anyone to come at. I dragged myself into the
toilet and put my head on the toilet seat. Several of my pubic hairs were stuck to the inside
walls of my toilet, which is something I should clean. Hello pubic hairs, I miss you, come
home.
My legs grew back and I sat on the toilet and urinated into it. It felt good to have my
legs back. I massaged them to let them know. I said, welcome back legs, I missed you, both of
you.
It wasnt raining outside so I didnt go for a walk. I put my duvet in the bathtub and
started my new book there. The bathtub is a good place to be because it is the perfect size
for a single human body. My bathtub doesnt have taps because I telephoned a man and he
took them away. I use the shower for that.
The book I am reading is called Heroes of Polar Exploration. It is a history of humans
going to cold places and dying in them. At the start of the book some Vikings go on a boat
and find Greenland. They have to leave Iceland because they punched and killed some
people there. There was grass and other good things in Greenland so lots of people went.
Then Greenland got cold and everyone died. When scientists found the skeletons they were
very small because of how the food didnt have enough star stuff in it for humans.
I ate a piece of bread with marmalade on it and sat in the garden. The sun started to
come up. The sky went grey and then blue and there were ropes of cloud in it that come out
of planes.



Today when I woke up my window was blue. This means that it was the same day as
yesterday. Time is like a very big slug that I am riding. Giddyup, slug.
I ate mushroom noodles in the garden and then used my spade to play the digging
90

holes game. The digging holes game is where I dig holes and then fill them in. The rule is
that I have to fill in each hole with soil from another hole. The challenge is to make lots of
holes and also to make the holes deep. Filling in holes is very satisfying. I like it when there
is soil on my hands and under my fingernails. Sometimes I put my hands straight into the
soil, but that is cheating and isnt as satisfying. I dug six holes and then the sky went black. I
went inside and put on my coat and went outside, through the front door. Whenever I go
outside, I say to myself, here we go again.
A woman was pushing a pram by my house. The baby in the pram was shouting or
maybe crying. Calm down, baby. I ran across the road. I was scratching the front of my head
so my wrist and arm was hanging in front of my face. I imagined that my wrist and arm was
the prong of a Viking helmet and I was a Viking and I was in Greenland and everyone was
going to die. Sorry, everyone. I imagined a scientist from the future finding my bones and
looking at them and feeling sad. A man and a woman holding hands were walking towards
me. I walked on the kerb and looked at my feet. My fingers started to feel damp which
meant a scab had come away. I didnt want to take my hand out of my hair in case people
saw my red fingers and thought I was disgusting so I kept my hand inside my hair and tried
to walk a little faster.
There were two girls in the shop. They were buying cider. I waited in an aisle next to
the teabags until they left. I gently traced the circular hole in my head. I imagined that my
finger was a figure skater and the hole was an ice rink. All of the judges give me tens. I am a
winner. I have won.
When the two girls left I started carrying packets of instant noodles to the counter. I
had to go back and forth because I couldnt take my hand out of my hair. I felt heavy like
there were dumbbells in my chest. What are you doing in there dumbbells? Get out. I also
got a small blue top milk and a carton of orange juice. The man in the shop said hello to me
and smiled. Sometimes, when he feels happy, the man in the shop tells me about the
weather outside. Once he gave me an out of date frozen pizza for free. I was too scared to eat
it so I just threw it around in my garden and then I think cats ate it.
He typed in my items slowly. I felt calm but my hand was still in my hair. It was more
difficult than normal to get my money out of my pocket and then to put my change back
into my pocket but I did it because I couldnt not do it. I said thank you to the man in the
shop and then walked quickly away from him.
91

I had beef noodles for dinner. I ate them in the bath.
I have been feeling very dizzy.
My arms are as heavy as houses.



I slept for a long time last night which I know because when I woke up it was morning. I had
a dream where I made friends with a lizard called Postman Tang. We went to Taiwan and got
rich from selling hugs.
My calendar says that I am having lunch with Larissa in two days. I like having lunch
with Larissa. We talk about our lives and about things that have happened and about school
and about current affairs. I dont know any current affairs, so Larissa tells me some. She
knows which kinds of current affairs I like to hear about (natural disasters, oil spills, Africa).
We always eat at the same restaurant. It is Chinese. They serve delicious noodles and there is
free green tea.
Once I tried to kiss Larissa. It was when our bodies were smaller. I moved my face very
close to her face and she said, what are you doing. I said, I am doing a joke, Larissa. Then I
put my face into my bowl of noodles and cried. I was scared to take my face out of the bowl. I
thought I wouldnt know how to respond to Larissas face. I kept my face inside the bowl
until she left the restaurant. Later on the phone I said, I think I have narcolepsy.
My calendar also says that it is bonfire night tomorrow. I like bonfire night because it
is like everyone letting everyone else know that they exist. By firing bright rockets into the
sky. Hello everyone, Im over here. I think I will buy a rocket. I think I will buy a red rocket.
Today I played the I have a dog game. The I have a dog game is where I pretend that I have a
dog. I called the dog Fitzherbert. Me and Fitzherbert played in the garden. We threw soil at
each other and laughed. I said to him, I feel like I have known you all my life. I put a bowl of
water on my kitchen floor and cooked Fitzherbert noodles. He wasnt very hungry. All the
more for me, Fitzherbert.
I have been getting very tired lately.
This month has lasted twenty seven months.
I have been sleeping for sixteen hours at a time.

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Today I woke up in the middle of the day. I ate vegetable noodles in the garden and waved at
the sun. Hello up there, sun. Remember me to the sea. A bird came close. It was kissing the
ground. My loud neighbours turned on music and it went away. Bye bye, kissing bird.
I made a bed in the bath and read about more people who died in the arctic. Then I
went on the internet to research narwhals. I have become very interested in narwhals since
I saw a picture of one in my book. Narwhals are cucumber shaped whales with tusks. They
are like unicorns without arms and legs and also they are real. People used to kill narwhals
and then eat their tusks to make them stronger and more magic. Ill stick to instant noodles,
thanks. I think I would like to live in the ocean. I think I would like to be a narwhal because
then no one could come close to me in case they got impaled on my horn. I would say,
WARNING! HORN!, to them and they would disappear.
I printed off some pictures and put them on my bedroom walls.
The pictures made me sad. The narwhals looked lost. I took them all down and put
them in the oven.
After that I went to the shop to get my red firework. There were already others
happening in the sky. Every time I saw one it sounded like a hello. Hello, I said. Hello person
underneath the green firework. The man in the shop helped me pick a rocket. I said I didnt
want anything too showy. I said something small and red would be perfect. The man in the
shop said he wanted to see the fireworks. He said hearing the sound but not seeing the
colour was upsetting. It was good talking to him. Some people came in though, so I took my
rocket and ran home.
In the garden, I dug out a little cave in the soil and planted it. I did a countdown. Blue
sparks happened overhead. Hello, I said. Hello person underneath the blue firework.
Mine went up.
It looked like a little red octopus in the grey.
Hello, I said.
Hello, I shouted.
And I know that the speed of light is faster than the speed of sound so I shouted, this is
where I was, and started jumping up and down and throwing handfuls of soil around
because it felt good today even though I didnt know why.
93

16.
Embarassing Moments
by Megan Boyle


Volunteered for show and tell but realized too late that I had forgotten whatever I was
supposed to bring. Found charms of faces from a broken bracelet in my bookbag and passed
them around, saying "These are tiny people, they are special." Everyone seemed confused.
(age 5)

Had to be talked to for masturbating in public several times, parent-teacher conference
once. Seriously didn't think anyone knew what I was doing.
(age 6)

X: We need to talk
Me: Okay
X: It's about your daydreaming
Me: What daydreaming
X: You don't pay attention in class
Me: Yes I do
X: What are you thinking about when you daydream?
Me: I don't know
(age 8)

Masturbated under a thin blanket while watching The Beverly Hillbillies movie with my
babysitter. She said "If you don't stop doing that I'm going to tell your parents."
94

(age 8)

In a car in Florida with my dad, aunt, and grandmother. We had just been to a doctor who
told my grandmother her cancer was incurable. My aunt was smoking out the window and it
was blowing into my face in the backseat. I was reading a Mad Lib containing the phrase "he
reached for his banana but instead pulled out a long, purple hair" and trying to suppress
uncontrollable laughter. I tried to make it sound like I was crying, but knew that it wasn't
working. My grandmother was sitting next to me.
(age 11)

Had to recite a poem I wrote in front of 8th grade English class. Poem mentioned Yanni, I
forget the context. Everyone's faces were blank and someone said "Yanni... ?" and people
laughed.
(age 12)

X: Why do you wear the same pants every day?
Me: I don't wear the same pants every day
X: Yes you do, does your mom wash them?
Me: I don't know, yes
(age 12)

Made out with TV while watching Con Air (crush on Nicolas Cage, brief period, weird).
Forgot to Windex. Mom found it, made me clean it.
(age 12)

Any time we had to perform improvisation exercises in drama class
(ages 13-17)

Me: Tom Cruise isn't really a dad, he adopted
X: Yeah, but they're still his kids
Me: No, they're not really his kids, you know, he's not their dad
X: Why isn't he their dad
95

Me: Because he just adopted them
X: I'm adopted
(age 16)

Any memory of auditioning for acting school, maybe especially the audition where I got my
period
(age 17)

For an exercise in studio freshman year of acting school, we were asked to perform the
stories of our lives from birth to present in 30 seconds. It had to be punctuated by some
"tragic, turning point moment." I think I got up there and spun around a few times. People
said it seemed forced, boring and unmotivated.
(age 18)

Any time I don't know the words to a song but try to sing along and someone is with me who
knows all the words and looks at me disappointedly
(ages 18-23)

Me: Oh, like the Barenaked Ladies?
X: (smacks back of my head) What the fuck, no, not like the Barenaked Ladies
(age 19)

Drunk at a diner with a group of people I didn't know but thought I could be friends with,
smelled calamari, turned around in booth, vomited on floor
(age 19)

Drunk Facebook message to the guy I lost my virginity to, still too traumatized to look
through old messages and find the actual text to this
(age 22)

Vaguely suicidal telephone call to ex-boyfriend
(age 22)
96


Uncontrollable public sobbing at an airport
(age 22)

Uncontrollable public sobbing at a dance party, then in a large van
(age 22)

Me: I feel sad, can we talk? I feel sad about relationships
X: What
Me: Do you want to just like, could you just hold me for a minute or something?
X: Goodnight, Boyle
Me: What
X: Goodnight
(age 22)

Made out while dancing with two guys on a stage at this dance party thing, ridiculously
drunk, didn't realize people were watching, was asked by the DJ to leave stage. Only
remember this in fragments, based on what people tell me. Embarrassing only because
people whose opinions I care about told me this happened and seemed disapproving.
Honestly doesn't feel like this was "me" who did that, since I don't really remember the
event, it seems even less like 'me.'
(age 22)

Me: I tried cocaine
X: Don't tell me that, I don't want to hear that you did that
(age 23)

Email from my dad saying he's read "Everyone I've Had Sex With"
(age 23)


97

List of Twitter accounts

Noah Cicero
https://twitter.com/noahcicero

Frank Hinton
https://twitter.com/frankhinton

Guillaume Morissette
https://twitter.com/monogamie

Justin Carter
https://twitter.com/banangolit

Lily Dawn
https://twitter.com/lilyyydawn

Frances Dinger
https://twitter.com/f_e_dinger

Richard Chiem
https://twitter.com/giganticanovel

Spencer Madsen
https://twitter.com/spencermadsen

Matthew Donahoo
https://twitter.com/empathetichorse

xTx
https://twitter.com/xtx33
98


Lucy K Shaw
https://twitter.com/LKshowbusiness

Michael Inscoe
https://twitter.com/michaelinscoe

Ben Brooks
https://twitter.com/ben_brooks

Megan Boyle
https://twitter.com/meganboyle