creative prose

Ode to the wrinkle forming just slightly left of the center between my eyebrows. I’ve turned 28 and my skin has started to shrink, to pull, and my expressions now stay half a second longer, locked in time. Sometimes I try to pull the line out with a gua sha, tugging...

“It wasn’t easy closing No Name, but all good things come to an end,” the designer says. “And I have to thank my father. Without an accountant in my life, running a business in New York would have been a mess. That’s how I could afford to start this L.A. studio.”The...

SpecialTeams3: zomg did u see how they made Michelle white? Bestieslog: Hated it SWMjersey: i hate these paintings GWMparamus: she’s like, grey… I mean when tf was she ever that? @queer4ula: ikr, the woman is caramel, why they doing her muted?...

This past summer I found myself stoned on a couch in the home of a person I did not know, watching a rerun of the 2005 film Wedding Crashers. Due to the nature of the weed, I was seeing things through a prism, and it was quite easy to divide reality into three or more...

It was not without unpleasantness that I answered the first phone call from a tabloid. They wanted to know what I remembered about the incident. I said, “Things are still a little hazy.” I roughly remembered being at an airport with Noga, watching her curls furl and...

My mother was sick, “sick unto death,” as Poe wrote. With my beleaguered father unable to work as an accountant and look after me and my six siblings, my mother asked her older sister Roxanne, a more patient and practical soul, to raise me until further notice. We...

Nina Salas was six years old when she was branded unpatriotic by school officials. The frazzled principal Mr. Kirk, her matronly first-grade teacher Mrs. Clayton, and the grouchy secretary at the front desk all agreed: Nina was unpatriotic.Every morning, Nina’s...

The buzz of the world enters her dream before she knows she’s waking up. A low flying police helicopter. The irregular cadence of a leaf-blower. Heavy tires too fast on the neighboring street. The Doppler shift of a passing siren.Up through her body the dream fades,...

Clark heard the car six seconds before it popped into view. The noise was dull. Just a low thud like a garbage truck. But that was the way it was: duller on the inside, and always felt more than heard.The hood crumpled first. Then went the windows in a kaleidoscopic...

This is the story of a woman who wants to sleep but cannot because her mind won’t stop wandering, a woman who knew that publishing her first work would be difficult, but who wasn’t expecting three sleepless nights in a row, who puts herself in bed and closes her eyes...

12.08.16He’s in a small town where she once lived, thinking of their old friend. He’s in the grips of something horrible, as if nauseated by how quickly he uprooted himself. He ran away because he was afraid, a coward in the way he suddenly packed his bags in the...

IIt was the first day of 1975, and the woman had little comfort left in her heart. She had sworn off all hope of ever bearing a child; the last loss came and went without warning, without fight, without defense. She wandered around the house in her mother’s old...