We all love thrift stores like we all love the scent of stale capitalism and dressing up in someone else’s addiction. We all love to play the salesman casting irony on the wool sweater and the postfeminism name pins that say Ask me about my smile. If I shoplifted a thrift store would America …
Drink a beer. Describe the taste.
i’d like to meet a person who takes pride in this country and isn’t corrupt or overeducated and underemployed yet still willing to spend 9 bucks on an IPA because they know there’s something so delicate about porches and dizzy the slow and the white the IPA tastes like privilege rebelled - sunny …
Write from this quote from Claude Levi-Strauss, “I am the place in which something has occurred.”
I am the fallout of a sunny day in September. I am in debt from listening to lectures spewed from the mouths of journalism professors who openly admit to being cynical about the jobs I’m applying for. But what options do I have with student loan payments and journalism being what it is today? …
The Never-Ending Breakup
We’ve seen each other two and a half times since we broke up eleven days ago for the third time since winter. We make these arrangements to meet on Facebook Messenger as if that’s somehow less personal, as if we’re really putting in an effort to try to be strangers. I no longer know the …
Making Soup
Blankets beckon the rain, and I indulge in a half-dozed dream state, giving my mind a good stretch into the far corners. I keep an ear on the weather: the cloud, the gloom, the shadow cast waking in a large bed alone, the mid-autumn grey, when it all sinks just a little. Things get quieter …
Describe Nearly Drowning
Bodies float alive on the Dead Sea. The Atlantic is an opaque ocean of dead bodies, and I’m gasping for breaths in between. Twenty three, the therapist diagnosed me. And there’s pills for that, he said. So I became an island nestled between salt and a hard place. Western medicine dehydrates my faith in humanity. …
You are a customer lying face down on the floor during a bank robbery. Describe the robbery from this vantage point.
Now is probably a bad time to ponder the carpet selection, but honestly I’ve been lying down on this thing for some time now, and though I’ve personally never taken the time to really observe this carpet, (I don’t come in here that much. Just my luck, right?) someone did obviously take the time to …
What is the place or object from your childhood that you most think about when you think about home?
When I was seventeen, I was told to hunker down. I was in an acting class and had just spent about fifteen minutes improvising a scene played out on a tightrope between the life I was living and the one I’d just created for my character. Real Life Improv - that’s what my teacher called …
She Was Crazy That Way
It was 2014, after dinner but before Thanksgiving when I sawed off the head of a deer. We were in the back shed surrounded by the thick scent of fresh death, and I was just a guest, an outsider when it comes to survival. “This should get us through winter,” the father said to his …
Your First Breakup
By late August, we'd exhausted our summer nights with the sort of innocuous chatter that in hindsight can only be defined as endless foreplay - coyly beating around the inevitable. Chris would park his car outside my house, just barely seventeen, a shiny license tucked into the wallet kept safely in one of the deep …
642 Things to Write About 