Ship in a Bottle

Vacation

With Skyward Arms

Duckling

Spellcasting

In The Car

Good Dog

No Cars No Girl

At The de Young

The beginning of the trip, with the streamers and the champagne and the leis and the smiling staff – that was wonderful, like I was in a movie. Everybody was so happy. Maybe my mistake was watching the land disappear behind us, or following cruise ship disasters on the Internet. In the expanse of charcoal blue water, under the blue sky, with only a thin horizon line to separate the two tones, all I could feel was an impending sense of doom. Bilbo Baggins could commiserate, I’m sure, and I…

I really, really liked having money. Past tense. It alienated me from a lot of the people that I love, and it made everything so, so easy. When you have to spread your money over dozens of bank accounts, and talk to investors and accountants and philanthropy experts and charity cases and hangers-on and family members that are suddenly in dire straits, it’s easy to feel very well-liked and wanted. Your phone rings constantly and there are people around, constantly. It dawns on you that what they want is your…

You have to stand very still. Try it. Be still, where you are. Don’t move. Don’t think about moving. Don’t think about your hands, because those always want to move. Have you ever held hands with a girl in a movie on a first date, and you’re trying very hard to never move your hand because you don’t want that moment to end? It’s uncomfortable. But you do it anyway. You have your hand in hers and you are willing it not to sweat. My advice is to never see…

I feel bad for all the people born pretty. You come into the world, and people expect everything from you. Maybe you have big beautiful blue eyes, or a speckle of freckles across your nose, so light they’re almost pink. Those poor souls born with perfect symmetry and piano-playing fingers and blessed with preternatural thinness – those folks were born with winning lottery tickets, and now fate wants to know what you would do with the money. The world really belongs to the ugly ducklings. Born with a blank check…

I met Nina at her work. She worked in one of those cafes where the baristas are allowed to be mean, and wear whatever they wanted as long as they had one of those half aprons on. I googled what she had on her t-shirts. Sometimes it was a band that (of course) I had never heard of. I downloaded their discography and listened to it through headphones on my couch, trying to imagine her listening to the music. The picture I had of her was romantic and probably incorrect…

My father is spooked. He has crazy eyes. He woke me up, and he looked at me with crazy eyes, and they haven’t gone away. He is sitting on the edge of my bed, looking at my bookcase on the other side of the room. I feel his weight on the bed, because it is a small bed and he is a big man, a bigger man than I am. I am not even a man at all, I am only 12. I think I am a guy, at least….

You are alone in an apartment that isn’t yours. You are taking care of a dog. The dog is active, and follows you around the apartment robotically, like a sentry, like it’s making sure you don’t mess anything up. It nudges your leg with its nose while you drink water from a glass, then wash the glass, dry it, and put it back in the cupboard, exactly where it was before. Two days ago, you moved everything you owned into a storage container. All of what makes you a physical…

I met her right before. My band was playing in a kitschy 50’s diner, dressed to the nines in bowties and matching grey wool pinstripe suits. We were playing Buddy Holly covers and I had on false, thick-rimmed ray bans. No glass, just plastic. The black frames around my vision made everything look like it was on TV. In the back corner, she sat with a malt glass and a frosted silver tumbler, texting on an anachronistic cell phone. The place was empty, just like every Wednesday night. We were…

A memory. We are at the ice cream shop as a team. Coach is buying, because we won. Kelly and I both get Bubble Gum ice cream, which is her favorite flavor. I don’t have a favorite flavor like everyone else. I just choose what Kelly chooses. We sit side by side, eating and spitting the mini gumballs out onto a napkin between us. All the girls on the team are laughing and joking and squabbling. One girl, Lisa, who used to be team captain, has strawberry syrup all over…