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.” […]
When you live in the country, the battle against the dirt is formidable and eternal. The sources are endless: • The dirt road in front of the house becomes so dry and dusty in the hot, long summers of central Iowa, that it forms translucent clouds from the tires of cars and bicycles making their way to the nearest neighbors. The soles of Keds tennis shoes are stained terra cotta from the dust that never washes out after the miles […]
Growing up in the Castro made Halloween fun for reasons traditional and otherwise. The otherwise was entertaining in the same way a Simpsons episode was at that age: funny for a simple reason then, and a different, more layered reason years later. Certain details of my Halloween would have been unique to most five-year-olds: three women dressed up like a tampon, sanitary pad, and the box they came in, nuns with stubble, and more than one very tall Dorothy, the […]
When I was 28 years old, I had nine children: Geo, Raya, Percy, Lulu, Will, Ariana, Ty, Jase, Caleb. But, if I’m being honest, they weren’t children, or babies, or even fetuses. They were embryos, and they were frozen, but they already felt like our offspring. Have you ever wished for something so much, that the illusion in your mind becomes the truth? That was me—2012—wanting so badly to be pregnant, that I fell in love with our embryos. The […]
I awoke with Dena shaking me. “Kim! Kim! Get up! It’s our stop!” I was still half asleep on my bench seat on an overnight train. We had spent the day before in Frankfurt and then hopped on this overnight train to arrive in Prague the following morning. It was my first time in Europe—backpacking for two months with my friend Dena. I was 22 years old. Fresh out of college. Dena and I were taking this trip because we […]
