Dear Cleveland, Or Whom It May Concern.

I'm furious with Ohio, furious the way you are with a child who's left the freezer open all night or with a politician who's turned some incalculably magical and vital and bunny-populated forest into a Giant Eagle or a Ross. I'm livid that every stranger in the grocery store has been transformed into a Diane Arbus photograph subject, everyone just an arrangement of congenital birth defects hauling  shopping carts of store-brand mariana; I'm angry, too, at the ghosts of beautiful men on bicycles, these perfect husbands that dog my periphery until their mermaid-tattooed counterparts rear up and replace them. I want to burn down the Church, and That One Bar in Westlake Where I Saw Red Krayola Once, and every other basement where I nodded and heel-stomped my way through my gorgeous, gorgeous youth. It is her fault that I have no syntax diversity, her fault that I romanticize the dismantled roller coasters on 43 and certain unfortunate brands of beer and, you know, that guy and that guy and that other, even more unfortunate guy. And I will keep doing this, keep writing these verby, accusatory sentences and dreading the space between nightmare and waking when I think of her, forever awkward and broke and disappearing her, until I am sure that she was just a trick of the sub-cortex, that she was never that great or never there  to start.

painting by alex cherry.

What I Did With My Summer Vacation

So I've been practicing being dead. Mostly, I do it during my shifts at McDonalds, when the people in the drive-through have started to blend into one continuous smear of  salmon-colored midwesterner. I scrape grease off the underside of the fry vat, and I turn off all my thoughts like I'm initiating the landing sequence for a goddamned 747, one brain-zone at a time. I do it, too, when my mother's commandeered the TV to watch that show with the ballroom dancers--you know, the one where the women are pretty much naked besides a couple sequins and those weird Lolita wigs with all the perfectly cylindrical curls. That One Chilean Fighter Pilot's mystic-tanned abs are my gleaming, undulating tunnel of light; I am in a huge, scrumptious oblivion as the clock hand whirls through their time slot, in my own, separate 0-4 time as their drum machine sends them foxtrotting into hell. 

I'm pretty much over spiritual revelations, which I've had about once a week since I turned fourteen. I'm done with LSD, and movies with less than six explosions per hour, and opera and ashrams and all that shit. I need to rehearse for nothingness, for my soul's eventual implosion. I've gotten too good at being myself. 

painting is by lawrence yang.

Whoa news! Not a story! Sorry!

So a bunch of these shorts that I vaguely assimilated into a short story thing got picked as a finalist in Diagram Magazine's Innovative Fiction Contest, judged by Kelly Link (who has a killer website with a dinosaur, and who I know very little else about), which might get me, like, you know, money and stuff. And I am definitely gonna be published in their next issue (e-issue?) and will get some shorts with the following monogrammed (deliciously) on the ass:

I submit to literally one contest a year if I feel like it, and this was my contest this year, so I'm pretty much totally amped on myself right now and my amazing writing contest batting record. Also, "How I'll Meet My Wife" is going to be on sixsentences.blogspot.com on may 30th, which gets me no money or shorts, but will hopefully garner me some measure of eternal fame. Also, it's a swell blog that I read often, and I thought I'd share. 

Onwards to non-self promoting/self congratulatory story time!

Reggie.

Since I've seen him last, they have removed all of his teeth. It was stomach cancer, so you'd think this kind of thing wouldn't happen--couldn't they just aim the cancer ray gun a little lower?--but it did, the radiation rippled through the reflecting pool of his body and turned him jackolantern. 

I am young, and colossally dumb, and I have done things like sat in church and prayed for a terminal disease: something to brighten the colors, coax out some gleaming eternal truth. I had wanted something to place a foot in front of the model train of my tiny, coursing life; I had not seen his breathless saxophone, or the cup that holds his new teeth, swimming carbon and bone. I do not know pain, know only slightly the feel of my tongue shifting in a mouth that is not my own, this jaw a bowl full of nothing.

drawing by Emily Jo Cureton.

A Humble Suggestion.

Let's play that game where we pretend it's the end of the universe. First, we'll be astronauts--I mean, this is the prototype apocalypse, no one's going for the Pulitzer here--and we have to slam our impossibly clean, white, American rocket into the heart of some amazingly badass ice comet that's hurtling directly towards the President's face. When the science of that seems shaky, we'll just go whole hog and invent an evil genius or two, place said evil genius(es) in an evil mountaintop lair and grab our nuclear harpoon guns for our race across the nation to stop him (her, them). We'll be super-computer-wielding underdogs who manage to quash the second (first?) coming of Y2k through the goddamned internet--don't worry, there will a completely inexplicable 3-D hologram fight scene in the middle, and it will be totally epic. We'll gas zombies, and stop missiles with telepathy alone, and unzip the double helix of a race of murderous super-evolved man-monsters (it will involve lasers). We'll save the world from an airborne AIDS strand, and be fed grapes and fantastic drugs by acres (I mean ACRES) of naked French women for our trouble. Or else, we will sit on my living room floor and hold hands; or in reality, I will sit here on this floor alone and dream all this, because what else is there to do when you are not in love? 

photo is by Dennis Darzacq

Sleep.

The thing is, we only slept. We didn't fuck or talk or prophesy any future fucking or talking: we turned the music off and yanked the lamp cord down and lay, our bodies two commas curled next to eachother against my sheets.

A typographical error, and I knew it: I could hear the whispers outside my room, all the air exiting the hall in one long swallow when I closed the door. And you know, I'm not that anxious to correct them. I will let the world think we are in love, that there is something alive and moving and happening in here. I won't let them see it: the accident of my body, next to and under and spilled around his body, like something shot us dead here in our tracks and we fell into these shapes, shapes wheere we might belong exactly.