He said if I was, I would get there -- to Heaven. She said we should shave our legs. Another He told me he loved me. I believed him and Let go everything in a breath. A breath! a sigh a slither a touch a shiver I forgot everything. The line between me now and the holy me, the one he says God says I should be: It is so fine a razor’s edge even. It cuts when I touch it. No unbitten apple, no snake, no nothing -- Can undo what I did. I wake in the arms of... Continue reading

In the months after I turned in my lover, a large cosmetic company offered me my own nail polish line. My father’s lawyer declined that and also the 64-ounce Guzzler or something or other that a mini-mart in Pennsylvania wanted to use my image on. He declined another fifteen other things, maybe more. Once, when the requests were at their height, my mother slammed her wine glass on the table so hard it shattered: “We will not make a mahk-ery of this fahmmily’s name evahhhhrrr,” she wailed. After TK was sentenced and my information-for-innocence deal settled, I did every interview... Continue reading

It’s easy for me to remember your face. All I have to do is look at you long enough. Give me five minutes and then I’ll know each line and shadow. Five minutes, maybe seven and I’ll have enough to wear your face like a mask over my own face when you walk away. I draw pictures of strangers for fifteen bucks. I could be doing more, but I’ve never tried, so I draw pictures of tourists whose names I will never know. I see faces the way that most people remember the smell of bread or cinnamon: a mother... Continue reading

It begins like this: Five weeks into twenty, she broke a little bit. No one knew why or cared to know why, but in October she was fine and funny and in November, she was not. The fall of her discontent dissolved into the winter and there were her parents, hovering over her hangover as she tried to wake at noon in the cinder-blocked dorm room where they had come to claim her. They huffed disappointment while she stuffed what she liked into black plastic trash bags. Together they split, just as she had wanted – quickly and without goodbyes... Continue reading

Sometimes, I plunge deep beneath their feet. As they breathe in and out, I sneak underneath. I can do that; I am sneaky. Beneath their toes, I feel fully every bit of what covers them. Their chests rise and fall, sometimes together but most of the time, in their own time. She moves one knee up so her feet can’t touch: it won’t last long. Soon enough, she’ll find her soles together. They’ll cuddle like they want to do, make that swish-swish-swish sound like they always do, which is the rhythm of her sleep and the way she dives down... Continue reading

"There is a dangerous moment between being a child of someone and not being that child anymore. It's a knife edge moment that can turn a child toward love or very far way from it. Resentment can manifest many things in a person, as love can. There is power in both equally." Sob sob sob, she thinks, crushing the thought, the paper, that stupid letter, at last her in hand. She had blood on her hands already and now she adds her mother's blood. She turns to the man, the one who stayed, the bleeding puddle of a guy hunched... Continue reading

They stood around her like an unholy halo, each in place like a number on a clock. Euri straddling the door which was twelve, Claudette at six by the bar, Roman at seven shoved to the side, collateral like always, just barely there, and Aloysius at ten. Slick was the little hand. Half-blind, head-smacked, he made his way to her: a half-step. a mis-step. a half-step. a side-step. a mis-step. He moved as he could: slowly, desperately, deliberately in time toward her. Euri licked his lips, tickled the roof of his dry mouth with his tongue. Roman felt his jaw... Continue reading

He shoved his tongue through the place where his tooth had been. It was smooth and cavernous, a hole not so different than the one when he was eight -- a puck to the face. He and his brother knelt on the pond ice and swept through puddles of freezing blood to find the thing. They figured if they had to go home like that, all fucked up like that, at least they better have it. His mother packed his face in ice, gave him some baby aspirin and took a picture. She put the tooth in a tiny baggy... Continue reading