Time is short, so here is the heart of it: everything I own in my house is alive. My reading lamp ate T-rex, my kitty. I came home from work today to the lamp hunched over the remains, the cat’s belly ruptured. The bulb lay on the ground beside, and when I closed the door, the lamp twisted its shade to regard me. Teeth filled the bulb socket and hung with gore. It hissed electric.
The guilt I feel for poor T-rex is tremendous. While I’d been increasingly aware for some time that things were not right with my possessions, I’d been sure poor T could hold his own. It is, after all, hard to imagine him being outrun by an object.
In his defense, I don’t think it was the lamp that brought him down.…
Author’s Note: I spent much of my formative art-making years dabbling and being inquisitive about many art-making techniques including sculpture, architecture, furniture design, painting, and collage. I found that even though collage has become the art medium I am most comfortable utilizing on a daily basis, it is the ability to freely move from one interest to another that pushes me. In 2010, I took a mixed media art class at the local community college. This is where I began working more extensively in the medium of collage, utilizing both existing images and forming my own imagery with paper.
Sometimes these pieces will host only a few clippings from magazines to tell the story in my mind, other times it will take many clippings weaved together for the piece to take shape.…
I didn’t reply to Jacob’s last text message to me, but I did show up to his funeral. I’d spent the entire morning deciding what to wear. A lot of the clothes that I once wore don’t quite fit me the way they used to in high school.
Is wearing black to a funeral mandatory? If funerals are truly meant to be a celebration of life, why can’t people wear something bright? I thought about wearing my orange polo, but I was worried I’d stand out too much. Maybe the key is to wear something somewhere in-between. So I went with gray.
A funeral is just a little bit different from a high school reunion. At high school reunions, you get to see who potentially has their life together and who doesn’t.…
I almost agreed to kill someone today. Almost. It sounds bad but it’s kind of my job. The person paying me, my employer you could say, was the guy who wanted to die. I wasn’t going to kill-him kill him, I hardly ever do. I just help people who are committed to doing it themselves. I make sure it reaches completion. The idea is to avoid a messy, half-finished outcome. I have sort of a good reputation in the business.
This is not what I wanted to be when I grew up. I didn’t major in self-actuated demise planning. I didn’t even take the elective. My post-collegiate aspirations were to take my sports marketing major with the international business minor and perform essentially any task offered by the global sports marketing industry.…
I’ve passed out three times in my life. Twice, while receiving spinal epidurals, and one time after too many tequila shots at my sister-in-law’s graduation party. Dizzy nausea hits first, next the confusion, then my hearing goes. I don’t get the prototypical tunnel vision; I assume my body gives out before I get to that point. I do get flashes of bright colors in the form of floating shapes. If they weren’t indicating an abrupt change in blood pressure, they’d be interesting to look at.
There were three nightmarish, unimagined days in the span of the six weeks it took my mom to die. I knew that whenever she died, there would be an unknown pain to endure. I had already dealt with the blow of the news.…
The itching was ridiculous. It was a fluttering torture, a soft-bristle brush teasing tormented nerve endings, making me want to laugh and cry, but mostly cry. It was like being tickled by a loving, giggling sadist.
It started in my toes — well, one toe actually. The big toe on my left foot. But the teasing, tortuous feeling didn’t take long to migrate to the other toes and onto the rest of my feet. The itch moved as it willed, meandering cruelly.
It started at night, kicking in just as I closed my eyes to sleep after a long day’s work. I didn’t know it at the time, but the night before that night was the last decent sleep I would ever have in my bed.…
The pair looks strikingly similar. Like sisters, although not twins. Dark, short hair, blue eyes, nice smiles, casual t-shirts, and jeans. Neither speaks right away, each seems to be waiting for me to begin. The one on the right has an eagerness to her, slightly leaning forward, expectant. The other, on the left, is comfortably seated with her back against the chair, posture perfect, tranquil.
I’m not sure who to address first since I’d asked them both to come. When life puts you in between things with no clear direction, I thought it best to get second opinions—from both sides. Then the one on the right, Ms. Expectant, clears her throat slightly, to which Ms. Tranquil acknowledges the break in silence, shifting her torso to the side and then back again to her peaceful neutrality.…
