The girl is waiting on the median for the light to change and the traffic to come to a halt. When it does, she steps down onto the street and walks in between the stopped cars, slowly passing each one, a cardboard sign held chest-high. Her eyeglasses reflect the harsh glare of the headlights and look like two white squares sitting on her face. She is probably fifteen or sixteen. Her hair is clean, pulled back neatly in a ponytail; her backpack is new, as are her boots—hardly a scuff or a stain. My emotions are mixed. I feel sorry for her, life out here is hard beyond belief, but I’m also relieved, in a “big sigh” sort of way. No doubt, like the rest of us, she has some sad stories to tell. No, not sad. Fucking heartbreaking.

The pounding in Amana’s temples won’t let up, and it’s beginning to scare her. She has had headaches before, but this is something different—it feels like some kind of creature has invaded her body and is occupying every square inch of it, from the tips of her fingers, which won’t stop tingling, to the pit of her stomach, which feels like it is being stretched and twisted and kneaded like bread dough.

About a week after it all happened, a friend of mine texted me.  He said he needed to talk.

I’d known Chris since the late 90s, when I lived in Salt Lake City Utah.  Chris now lives in Nevada, in Las Vegas with his boyfriend.  It’s not really relevant but they broke up in January sometime over increasing tension in their household.  Chris’ boyfriend hadn’t voted in the election.  It wasn’t something Chris could let go.

Here’s what the random word generator gave me: “copper, explain, ill-fated, truck, neat, unite, branch, educated, tenuous, hum, decisive, notice.” I was a detective working clues.

The children appear from the edges. Their faces set. Their bodies are covered in iridescent powders that shimmer in hues that could only be seen in dreams. We have been gathered in the square to wait. Our kin have been gathered to watch. The children walk around us in a pack, sniffing, running towards us and back again to their circle. Worn, brown leather pouches hang around their necks, swaying with their movement.

No one wanted to hang out with Janie anymore and I thought that was unfair. It could have been any number of things that turned the group off to her but in my book she was better than alright. Maybe I was being sentimental but Janie was one of ours and I wasn't ready to let her go.

"On with the American machine, down with grass and trees!" Dad said. I laughed, because, for fuck's sake, why was it time to turn the vacant lot next door into a new parking lot? The town was nothing BUT parking lots. We had just found out about the city’s decision, which gave me a helpless feeling.

It was inside the desk where she hid all of her secrets. On the surface were the objects that immediately spoke of the history she didn’t want to hide. The mahogany pencil boxed, handmade and carved with intricate leaves and vines, given to her by her grandmother on the day of her high school graduation; the framed photo of her grandmother, who did not live to see her college graduation; and her favorite coffee mug, the one she says she can’t work without.

So what do you do if you wake up and realize that the gently marinated and care fully crafted and harmoniously preserved memory of the you in your mind’s mirror first formed over twenty years ago, the you that was your most perfected self and doing the best impression of you that you have ever done, the you that you heretofore looked back on wistfully that existed before the stock market crashes and the psychotic ex and the security pat-downs and the parent-teacher meetings and the terrorism and the internet (parental controls, password changes, and screen pop-ups ‘oh my!’)…

“Who woulda thought the desert be this fucking cold?” He tried to raise his shoulders to his ears, but they kept shivering down.  It hurt to look at the stars, they were so blistered white and scattered.

It was a summer that had snuck up on us. All of a sudden, condensation appeared against gin glasses and kept skirts slicked to tanned thighs. We would go on parties every other evening, hanging over balconies on Suffolk or Sullivan, catching cool breezes. We would hold cigarettes to our sunburnt lips, lighting them with crisp folds of cash as we sunk into the bursts of music floating up from the second floor.

My son is dead and it’s your fault, Mr. Clark. Yours and your father’s.

That’s what Rosa wants to say as she stands in front of Richard Clark’s desk, bringing Richard Clark his coffee, looking at Richard Clark’s handsome face and the measured striations of gray in his hair.

Emberly and Sahar only met in the confines of a bedroom; not for sex, but for more intimate affairs. They met for some time after enough nights of fooling around in a car, but the more time they spent together, the sexual tension stripped itself gave way to movie nights and hair brushing. Together, they were a cute couple, but the proximity was soon unwelcome.

“So I told my boss to piss off,” I said.

My wife’s normally serene face turned to stormy red. Was it the unusually colorful language I used in front of our three children?

Do you remember that summer we decided to eat only bread? Or I decided bread, and you broccoli.

Amy looked around. Everything was pink. Pink walls, pink bedspread, pink pillows, pink TV. Pepto-Bismol pink, Freudian pink; as if the Disney princess had died. Banksy would love this. She turned on the TV; every show was in pink. The Bachelor was in pink. Jamie Oliver was in pink. Even Shark Tank was in pink. Reality was the new pink. Or pink was the new reality.

Along the horizon, south of the United States, an expanse of crenellated concrete rises out of the Pacific and vanishes into the east, making tangible the intangible: an imaginary line bisecting a land once one. Tall and proud The Wall stands. Forty feet high and twenty feet deep. Its surface unadorned with design or texture. Just flat and grey through and through. Mighty enough to thwart the charge of fifty thousand Spartans. Priam of Troy would have envied it, the great lodestar of American Jingoism.

From birth until the sixth grade, home was a room on the tenth floor of the Hotel El Dorado in downtown Los Angeles. During its heyday in the 1910s and the 1920s, the hotel stood at the foot of the Spring Street Financial District—the Wall Street of the West—amidst the Braly Building (at twelve stories tall, the city’s first skyscraper), the Hotel Alexandria (frequented by the stars of the Golden Age of cinema, Humphrey Bogart and Greta Garbo), and, just blocks away, City Hall, all regal and white, looming over the blooming metropolis. The El Dorado flourished with all in its proximity and even lay claim to its own celebrity resident in Charlie Chaplin, but by the 1960s the financial institutions fled west to Wilshire and Figueroa, and the burgeoning quarter was rendered hollow. Its splendor laid to waste.  

i am normally not the kind of dog who whistles at women on the street or stalks them with my eyes. i figure ladies have enough to worry about without some creeper giving them a hard time

Blush, I think, is the most important component when making up a corpse. I could not effectively do my job without it, I think as I apply the tiniest amount to the face of an eighty-year-old man who died of a heart attack. He must have been a drinker. I’ve been given a picture of him from when he was alive and he had ruddy cheeks.