Activity

What I noticed immediately was her long blond hair; it had the sheen of buttered toast. She stood with one hand on the pole, one hip cocked. Her eyes were blank, lips loose. She didn’t do any pole tricks, barely looked at the crowd. She didn’t act flirty or sultry or brash; nor did she act timid, t…

the sweet, woody smell of it mingled with that of his drugstore-brand dandruff shampoo and the Italian soap he used to hand-wash his lingerie, plus an underlying scrim of a thirty-seven-year-old dude—chopped garlic and decay

After our first date in Chinatown, I couldn’t wait to tell Mazzy about Dino, how he was The One. I called her the next day until she picked up. I’d just gotten home from the library and made myself a pauper’s dinner: fried rice with mayonnaise, a bit of dried dill on top. Everything tasted good to …

And then there was Dino, with his grade-A ketamine. Our two-year romance. The kicked-off shoes. The roses in the wallpaper, sliding down the wall. K-hole conversations with angels and demons and post office workers. Daylight creeping under blackout curtains. Trapdoors opened in the carpet (whoosh).…

There was a bartender named Jax who liked to drink. He drank so much he tasted inhuman, like pencil erasers and steel. Mazzy detested him. His texts always came after midnight, when I knew he was blackout. I was a cross between a booty call and a suicide hotline. Still, I replied. He was so much ni…