My mother was diagnosed with cancer for the second time in 2010, less than a month before my wedding. After that, weird things started happening to me. I began to dream about Jack White.
Categories: Jen Bosworth, Story Club North Side
The first time I ever masturbated, I buried my underwear in the backyard. Yes. You heard me correctly. I was eleven the first time “dirty love juice” had ever come out of my … no. No. I couldn’t even say it. Good Catholics did not do this. They did not masturbate. They did not say the word penis outside of a doctor’s office. That shit was vulgar. And at that very moment, as I lay in bed soaked in fluids, […]
Categories: Paul Canada, Story Club Minneapolis
There is nothing worse than leaving a party. I am the absolute worst at it. It’s not the leaving so much as having to say all of those dreadful goodbyes. The hugs, the handshakes, the air kisses—it all makes me anxious. I prefer a nice Irish goodbye.
Categories: Jeremy Owens, Story Club North Side
So, there we stood in the parking lot of the Chateaux Rose in Rosemont, watching Kelly’s dad puke. When you’re a kid, seeing an adult vomit is like spotting your teacher in public, but way worse. You’re shocked and appalled by their realness, their human-ness, and, in the case of Kelly’s dad, their complete and total drunkenness.
Categories: Lara Levitan, Story Club North Side
My grandmother Madeline often glanced up from her sewing or stopped the vacuum cleaner, stared at me for a long moment and said, softly, “God will give you blood to drink.”
Categories: Carapace, Randy Osborne
I threatened to murder my brother once. It was a hot summer day in his room, which was at the top of the stairs, littered with dirty clothes and He-Man action figures. It was 1986. I was ten years old. Carl Eric was about to turn seven. In his fingers, he had a tangle of my chest-length dirty blond hair and was yanking, hard. This was his preferred maneuver in our many physical fights. I know what you’re thinking, who […]
Categories: Angela Benander, Story Club North Side
For the past eight years, at the first sign of frost, my mother has packed up her things, coolly kissed me goodbye, and boarded a plane to a lesbian retirement commune in Florida. At the lesbian retirement commune, the houses are painted soothing coral, ocean blue, sunny yellow, and have mermaids and parrots dangling from the eaves. The women, who all resemble Roger Ebert on a tropical vacation, drive around in golf carts and wave to each other with a […]
Categories: Adrienne Gunn, Lit Mash
“Hi there, Mrs. Jones? My name’s Maggie. I’m the one who has been talking to all of the families here in Hanover this summer about those study guides to help your kids with schoolwork. It only takes a quick minute to show you. Do you have a place to sit down?” I have recited that script about 10,000 times. It is seared into my soul. It haunts my dreams. That’s what happens when you devote two summer vacations to selling […]
Categories: Maggie Jenkins, Story Club North Side
In college, I was a raging, unapologetic gay-basher. Still recovering from Christianity, I voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984 and would sit in the cafeteria at the University of Arkansas, holding court on how disgusting gays were, and how they should all be shipped out to a “Gay Island” and left to sodomize each other. I had my entourage of college boys, laughing at my angry rants, my hate-filled comedy of intolerance. I was like a young Rush Limbaugh, gathering […]
Categories: Don Hall, Story Club South Side
