Here’s a secret about movement: speed cares only about distance, but velocity is aware of direction. Here’s another secret about movement: every living creature on this planet is moving fast. But the body tricks us into not noticing the…
1. The first ghost I ever learn about is God, circa 1998, in a kindergarten classroom in Queens, New York. My parents have sent me to Catholic school not out of religious devotion, or some need for strictness, but…
The trick is to write about the body without deploying the body, which has been strained by overuse and anyway tends to make objects or corpses of us: the animals in question. And, we are such animals; my sister…
“Don’t live with your hand on the stove.” —Dave Hickey Emergency Exit When you were barely one year old, I fled to Las Vegas. It’s not like I walked away from my first hit and straight to McCarran. I…
January Two old men used to live next to each other. One is dead and the other is dying. The one that is dead planted a garden. The one that is dying is my father. My father sits in…
Hunger never came naturally to me. As a baby, I didn’t cry for milk, preferring to gaze at the mold-splashed ceiling and grab at dust motes, twining my tiny hands through their light. Elaine told me this was because…
The day you killed your mother, you wished your father dead. A whole life of could-bes glittered in your mind. A beauty parlour for your mother, reams of thread and pots of sticky wax. A lunchbox business, stacks of…
A girl is trained first and foremost to satiate and please, to induce salivation from: boys, men, priests, teachers, plumbers, fathers, brothers, dogs, occasionally horses. A girl is trained to survive others’ pleasures, others’ desires, her own saliva…
On the Big Island of Hawai‘i, Honokaa is the town tourists drive through to get to Waipi‘o Valley. At the top of the valley is a scenic overlook, which provides an unobstructed view to the black sand beach, river,…
Essay by J. A Tyler • Milk Fed made me want to ingest a mountain of delicious, sugary, fatty foods—donuts, chips, pizza, candy—then sprint into the arms of some lusty entanglement. Yet the novel also gave me bouts of…
