Your senses become attuned in the desert. I used to think it was a blessing, but I'm not so sure now. There are things I'm proud of. I can show you where the coyotes fight and where scorpions have their promenade à deux. I can hear
My relationship with punk and hardcore music was one I didn't wade into carefully. I did not dip my toe in to check the temperature or throw a stone into the deep end to see if predators lay in wait. I leapt into into those murky fathoms, monsters
There's no greater poverty than loneliness. It can drive people to pitch black places. Alan Volk is the blackest place you'll ever go. Moving in your senior year was hard enough, the threads of your life slashed to fraying ends by your father's work
"I have been a customer here for a long time and no one has ever spoken to me this way!" A cloud of perfume your grandma would wear drifts off the lady and you think of mustard gas flooding a trench with vaporized death. You respond by pulling
It's an endless winter where I live. The howling wind creeps beneath my parka as I drag the body between walls of naked pines. Their branches reach up like nerve cells, desperate for sensation but cursed to only experience this cutting cold. It's perpetual dusk where
The party is in full swing by the time you arrive. You sink into the brown couch whose floral pattern is all but a memory buried by stains. Facing the TV a tattooed hand passes you a lukewarm Coors. The sound it makes as you crack the can open is
The house sat unoccupied for what seemed like an eternity, and rumors swirled around it like spectral mist. It was a ranch home built in the seventies, all brown and beige and shag carpet. The occupants had vacated on November first leaving a Beistle black cat decoration, its back perpetually