He was about her age, twentysomething; he was also, somewhere under his filthy clothes and exploding dirty hair, good-looking. Handsome even. Drug addict, she concluded. Any second her Uber would be here.
Cracks in the Sidewalk
Anaesthesia Dolorosa
I hadn’t interacted much with Nadia. Our paths had crossed but never overlapped. My mother hired help for almost everything but had never outsourced parenting.
Be My Man
He couldn’t speak words he didn’t know about feelings, truths, mysteries, and ecstasies he didn’t understand. He couldn’t bring himself to speak of the shame amplifying within him, though he tried, parting this stitched-up lips to speak.
Compassion Fatigue
Though fascist-like, it was only because of her mother's idiosyncratic serving style that she could roughly track the course of the evening. She’s sure it happened sometime between caviar baskets and pâté de canard sandwiches.
Grocery
I’m stealing cough syrup and size-six gel insoles. Appropriate clothing is necessary. Insoles in the jacket. Robitussen in the backpack. The weight of these things in the clothes. They pull me down a little. Closer to the earth. I’m not a thrill seeker and I’m no role model. I seek only an equilibrium.
Flock Apart – Editor’s Pick
The boiler was an oven, three stories high, tiled inside with innumerable iron plates. It incinerated bark and limbs and waste wood to power the generators that ran the paper mill, burning twenty-four-seven, except when, like that afternoon twenty years ago, it needed to be overhauled. That’s when they fed people like Mo and me into the boiler.