My 22-year-old goldfish darts across the tank, her tail covered with white spots, her body swollen and lopsided.
I kneel by the water and tuck the hand-painted stone into the nook of a fallen log.
I sit quietly while a friend tells a story from my past. It’s a favor—he’s my surrogate, projecting as I can’t.
Everyone in this story is dead except me.
“If both of us were hangin’ off the side of a mountain, you’d try to save her first.”
A shot glass of pineapple liqueur on my kitchen counter.
The courtroom doors closed but the confrontation wasn't over. Dad wanted to speak with us.
I am 13 and I have a revolver in my hands. I am aiming for a silhouette of a man.
I’d waited at my friend’s funeral to share the poem I’d written about him, the one his wife asked me to read.
They found me my first week of college: a wild-eyed religious group, sure in the knowledge that they were the true Chosen.
I’m on my bike in a red helmet, the Catalinas swallowed by clouds, when I text my ex-husband for the first time in five years: "Our son is turning thirty!”
He’s on the couch opposite me, a cloud of vape smoke hanging between us.
Today, we were reading Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations in our classics class and in the hallway after I try to apply the teachings . . .
The air is filled with the smell of latex, bleached bedding, and cleaner, but I can still smell my own shampoo.
My mother’s voice cracked into a sob, sharp and trembling. “I take care of four kids, you have no idea—”
Standing alone, center stage in the blinding glare of the theater's spotlight, I wasn't nervous.
My mom feeds Buster, a squirrel she named for his busted ear.
We attempt to cross the thick rope hanging over the water. My choice.
I left the oven on, I laughed. 400 degrees for hours.
Both of us were divorced: she had a terrific daughter and an insane beagle; I carried faded dreams.