Try as she might, the nurse’s aide could not yank out the foley. A foley is essentially a hose attached to the patient’s penis that allows him to pee without getting out of bed. At first she worked with delicacy and precision, and then she worked with force. She was getting frustrated. Medication had numbed me, so I didn’t feel anything. After a while she went to get the nurse. The nurse followed the same routine, first trying to ease […]
Dear Maria, I like you a lot, a whole lot. I want you to be my girlfriend. I’ll be the best boyfriend ever. Even though we are both only in the 5th grade, we would make a great couple forever. I promise to never ever hurt cheat on you or hurt you. For real!! Think about it, and pick yes or no. My Dad says maybe is for cowards. Love Always, Me PS. When you say yes, I’m going to […]
Cold scratches at my face as I slowly peal the blankets to look through an open space. The deep men’s voices on the other side of the wall are pitching louder and angrier. Muffled threats. A thud against the door. One of the men laughs. The other gets louder. Mental calculations click down in my head. Ten steps to the door—three seconds tops. Run across the cement floor, heave the door open, and fly past them. Quickly, so they won’t have time […]
The first time I smoked crack was an accident. I was 20 years old, living with my mom in an unremarkable eight-story building in the suburbs. We lived on the seventh floor, and Carmen lived on five. She had just turned 40, and she was short, energetic and sexy. At least, she was sexy to 20-year-old me. Today, I’d see her low-cut tops and long fingernails as tacky, but at the time, I couldn’t see past her big boobs. When […]
The furniture store is both overwhelming and fun. We’re walking around the perimeter, sitting on couches, and testing out dining chairs. We’ve moved into our fourth apartment together and it feels like we’ve arrived. Maybe it’s that we are officially out of the city. Evanston might only be a CTA ride away, but there is something distinctly suburban about it. He’s going to work from home. I have a new job at Northwestern. Our cats love to run up and down the […]
“You’re so cute! You’re like a baby seal covered in oil.” My roommate said this to me as I washed a zip lock bag in our sink and explained how we should reuse plastic products. His words shocked me. The image of an oil slick seal cub with my crying face came to mind. I liked being called cute, but I did not like being compared to a helpless baby animal. To my roommate, a seal and the word “cute” […]
I walked through the screen door and by instinct I searched for a copper basin of holy water to genuflect. My grandparents’ house can easily be mistaken for the gift shop at St. Peter’s pearly gates. Every space in the house was occupied by a ceramic replica of a saint or a life size crucifix. Jesus Christ, Mary, Joseph; all the angels and saints glared down at me as I walked through the holy halls. A Sunday morning after church […]
My college boyfriend still insists that the day he met me, I was wearing a pair of overalls. The fact that I have never actually owned any overalls does not make this an implausible memory. Truth is, I was exactly the kind of girl who would wear such a thing – if, that is, I wasn’t already wearing a burlap sack, a dropcloth, or a muumuu. What I had a hard time believing, as I stood just outside our Art […]
Moaning is your last resort. The trick with a good pay-per-minute phone sex call is not to make the caller cum, but to keep him on the phone for as long as possible. It’s what the dispatcher taught me during my only phone sex training session You moan and the call is as good as over: he’s going to cum. “Hi, this is Violet, who’s this?” “John.” “Where are you calling from, John?” The Johns would say, “My bedroom…in Arizona.” […]
