No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story. No Kings.
They waited tables at the same restaurant. Brent was a year older than Mariah. He was a senior in college, a business major, working for rent and beer money, instead of kids’ clothes, frozen dinners, and daycare payments. They’d met a few months before, when he first got hired. His first day on the job, he stepped in when Mariah screwed up an order and the customer started cussing her out.
I've initiated the art of flash reading.
...Why did I follow her meekly all the way to Thailand? Why did I allow myself to be dragged here in the first place? As we walked along the dirty sidewalk, I pondered these questions, and unwillingly admitted the answer—because she is my mom. In Chinese culture, filial piety is the prime virtue; as a daughter, I owe my mother unwavering respect, gratitude, and obedience. Resistance would have brought harsh criticism from all sides of the family: “Your mom works so hard for you, and she just wants you to go to a concert with her. You are a person without gratitude…” I wanted to scream, “I don’t want to go!”
we'd been spit forward from our youth and were now in middle school. the building looked more like a prison than most prisons did...
We finished work at five. No time for dinner. The weather was bleak and getting bleaker, windshield wipers swatting sleet and sleet still coming, brake lights strung like beads along a northbound red zone—Google Maps rerouting. Thirty minutes turning into forty, forty into forty-five, but this could be our lucky break. We were determined to arrive.
. Look, she said, pointing at the painting of arms like vectors to an otherwise armless place. We hunched before canvas after canvas laying our sketchbooks on the floor, lead scattering ant-like under our scabbed elbows. This is what it takes to be made right: to follow the leash of each other’s bare hiccups, our impressions of the world yet unformed.