Humanity: Raw & Unfiltered
The air smelled of exhaust, of snowfall, of woodfire stoves. Julie held herself stiff, breath appended in her lungs, as she raced into the swirl of snowfall, the shavings sharp and virgin as diamonds, the shavings lashing the air, as the old Ford spat and chugged, coughed and spat and Read more
I’d arrived in Los Angeles two years earlier, on New Year’s Eve, 1979, after completing graduate work at the University of Minnesota and deciding that I wouldn’t survive another midwestern winter. So after a three-day road trip in my ex-husband’s Chevrolet Impala that included striking a deer in South Dakota, Read more
Baltimore, Maryland July 1985 I curled two fingers under the chin of my mask and tore it off. I chipped away at myself with the tip of a syringe when no one else would do it for me. The nurse’s assistant, the friend of a friend’s cousin from the suburbs, Read more
The trouble started the day she was born. Before that, really—as soon as the sonogram showed up. She was a she, and he couldn’t register that. He was proof that even some of the smartest gator-poaching hicks remained fluent only in the language of macho: talk of bullets, ballistics, and Read more
For one hundred and twenty-five years, I’ve been nothing more than a watery whisper, dissipating in shifting waves, crumbling to shadowy fragments, perpetually washed upon the sandy shore. My fingers are ghosts stretching longingly and painfully back to Norway, where love was once known. Cruelly, my spirit is trapped here: entrapped Read more