From Longleaf Review, August 2019
I’m six months out from my divorce, and my son Franklin and his boyfriend Alonso are waiting with me in an Outer Sunset restaurant kitchen with a sound guy, a cameraman, and a chef. I do a morning show (“Mornings On 2!”), which is not something I ever thought I’d do, but who can predict the future? Anyway, my producer thought it would be cute to have my high school son and his boyfriend cook something for a Mother’s Day piece, and then at the last minute, literally, I’m standing there with two uncracked eggs in my hand next to a chef in a chef’s hat, which is way too on the nose but whatever, and my producer calls and says, “Oh, by the way, you know that author, the blabby memoir dude, Karl Knaus-whatever the fuck his name is, something Scandinavian, he’s going to make the egg shit with you. Sorry. He’s on a book tour. I couldn’t get out of it. It’ll be great!”
Yes, I knew who he was. For the two years prior to our separation, my ex-husband read every word of Knausgård’s endless volumes, and our conversations went like this: “What woman would be granted this ridiculous amount of page space to spew minutia?” (No woman.) “You barely speak. Why would you be drawn to someone who can’t censor his banal thoughts?” (Can’t explain it.) I saw Knausgård’s bookback face more than I saw my husband’s, which at that point was fine, I guess. It had been eighteen years. We were sick of each other and past being sad about it….
from Passages North, October 2019
It’s Friday, and we leave work early and drive from Oakland and stop in Boonville, which is a town known for nothing, where it’s 110 degrees after 65 in the city. We throw our jackets in the back of the car and go for ice cream. I’m the idiot who orders a brownie at the ice cream place and then feels sorry for myself when it’s not as good as the ice cream.
We sit outside, and the air is hot but dry. There is dust on our ankles, and the tiny purple flowers in the wine barrel planters are whole colonies of beautiful things that I have to look away from so I don’t cry….
From American Short Fiction, December 2018 web feature
Someone in Canada uses my credit card when I’m with my family watching bats circle through the dusk around the upper rim of the Grand Canyon. The bank calls to ask if I’ve purchased twelve hundred seventy-nine dollars of perfume, liquor, and cigarettes in Montreal in the last hour. It seems unexpected, the phone agent says, and I imagine the list of my actual purchases from the last two days: gas, pretzels, candy in cellophane bags, one night at a Best Western in Santa Rosa, New Mexico, where the hot tub was questionable but we all sat in it anyway because after 10 hours of driving, much of it on two-lane highways in western Kansas where the whole world was feed lots and semis driven by opioid addicts who ground pills in truck stop bathrooms, we were willing to take one more risk. ….
from Okay Donkey, May 2022
“With dark coats to our shoe-tops, we were glorious on sidewalks, heads floating, bobbing above concrete, walking, walking, 72nd, 71st, 70th. Stopped at the light, cigarettes going. Big sunglasses, big bags. We had zero interest in pleasantries. We carried Marlboro Lights in Marlboro Reds boxes. We weren’t total masochists.
We were 33, and we had been so many things: regular babies, child actors, regular actors, moguls….”
from Pidgeonholes, June 10, 2019
This was in grad school when my apartment was the first floor of a house next to a man who became newly convinced every night around 3 AM that someone was setting him on fire. He screamed the same guttural scream over and over, and the fire truck rolled up because he called them, so they had to. The man’s apartment occupied the back of a pink stucco house, which, though entirely in decay, was somehow also a little hopeful and wistful because of the pink. I liked looking at it from the bay window in my apartment’s living room, though less so at 3 AM when the firefighters landed their boots in my rectangle of vegetable garden and the man who thought he was being set on fire was flat on the grass and his screams subsided and then the firefighters guided him to his screen door with its scroll-work iron S that likely once meant something to someone. …
From Passages North, Fall 2021
A month after my mom dies, a month during which I have no one to talk to about the best pink Himalayan salt crackers you can find only at Costco or the way baby pigeons look like human penises onto which some child has drawn a cartoon face, I find a service, “Your Dead Mom,” to text me a few times a day and pretend to be my mom. It’s what they do…..
from Smokelong Quarterly, Issue 65, September 2019
It’s not what Jane should be doing, but it’s what she is doing. Standing on the periphery of the children’s subsection of the cemetery. Emoji mylars on plastic sticks and stuffed bears made sad by weather. Jane is there with a man who built a sitar for her husband (a fucking sitar!). The man’s jeans are around his ankles, as are hers, and she sees the “Hope is the thing with feathers” tattoo on his thigh, which makes her hate herself for having chosen him.
Hope was never a thing with feathers. Guilt is the thing with feathers. It flaps around and eats your grass seed. She would say that out loud to the man if she thought he would get it, but no one gets the things that she says. It’s not that they are complex or funny or even interesting. It’s just that she has always been the person at weddings who cannot or maybe just will not dance when “Dancing Queen” comes on and everyone else is dancing….
from Atticus Review, October 2019
It’s May, and the peonies drip ants and bob with the wind. The college girls sit on the grass in nylon shorts and midriff tops with the names of beach vacation spots they may or may not have visited: Maui! Huntington Beach! Laguna! Inside, Joan moves a spoon around a bowl of Life cereal and watches them. It’s what she’s always done, study and then imitate. Otherwise, she has no idea.
Outside, robins chase each other from tree to tree. Hannah puts on her headphones, and Brielle pulls one side over to her ear. The two of them laugh and fall backwards on the grass, and their legs are touching. All Joan can hear is Hannah screaming, “Oh my god, literally everyone is named Hannah.”….
from Jellyfish Review, February 2020
Jova insisted she was John the Baptist, which was fine, I guess, because I had claimed Jesus even though it was clear to both of us that she was more the Jesus type. That was our dynamic, though. She was better and cooler, and we both knew it, but she stepped back all the time and let me play the role just to be nice, which felt good and bad at the same time….
from Smokelong, June 2021
She had a sheet over everything, and she took it off.
She had a sheet over everything, and she took it off.
No one liked it.
Literally no one liked it.
The people who were letters in her phone stopped calling. That’s a lie. They never called. They stopped sending her strings of letters that asked things like, “How are you?” “You doing okay?” “Let me know if you need anything.”
Once she responded to the final question with “Tomato soup,” and the reply to that was a yellow face laughing and crying at the same time, to which she said, “No really.” And the person was dot dot dot and then nothing.
from Wigleaf, February 2019
When you turn ten, you move with your mother to a giant house in Sea Cliff owned by a musician. The pale stucco of the house looks built from shells. From every back window, you can see the orange of the bridge when the fog blows sideways. Glass beads in strings hang from doorknobs so that each opening and closing of a door sounds like animal teeth in an open hand.
You've lived so many places with your mother: Echo Park with a painter, Topanga with an actor, Arcata with a dealer. Six months in some man's house and then out and on someone's pull-out couch or sometimes balled up in the car where you wake hungry to ravens making a cackle of the morning. …..
from Pithead Chapel, February 2019
On Halloween, it takes June and Phil well over an hour to make it from Echo Park, down through Santa Monica, and up the PCH toward Topanga where June’s sister Irene hosts her annual Halloween party. June—nearly nine months pregnant—is dressed as a horse, and Phil is dressed like a shirtless Vladimir Putin. They are both terrible at Halloween, at parties in general, but Irene was insistent.
“After the baby, you’ll never leave the house,” Irene told June, and if the baby-having aftermath of her friends was any indication of her impending reality, June is sure Irene is right. …