Red is the glow of a bonfire burning low between stolen glances.
Red is a plastic cup filled with sour liquid that stings like a sunburn.
Red is the burn of cranberry vodka as it stains clean white porcelain.
Red is the hem of my sundress, pushed up around my waist.
“Red looks good on you,” he grunts into my hair, sticky with liquor and vomit. “Brunettes always look hot in red.”
Red is blood circling the drain, coiled like smoke from a fired gun.
I stare at the red nail polish still sitting on my bathroom counter. It’s the only red thing I own that I haven’t purged yet.
Red looks good on you.
“Your eyes look red,” my mother says over a plate of burned toast.…
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Izzy’s brow pushes up and she smiles. I made this for you, she says. She passes him a thin brown paper bag. The professional sleeve sort of bag with a smooth sheen.
Awesome, Jude says. The sleeve makes a crackling sound as he unfurrows it. He draws from it a parchment paper. The paper is thick and impressed with ink. Thank you, he says as he studies the parchment.
I did it in my printmaking class, she says. She cranes her neck forwards and nods. She was a sophomore in art school.
He’s not much older. It’s wonderful, he says, flicking on the dome light above to make sense of the lines, as he sits in the passenger seat of her parked car.
There’s like, boars, and they’re trying to eat the woman’s face.…
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Her favorite daydream puts her on the beach at sunset, her body slowly releasing the heat of a long afternoon. “This is how a clay pot must feel,” she tells herself. “When it is just released from the kiln.” And then she laughs, in her dream, an airy, lilting laugh that drifts slowly away across the incoming waves. Seagulls twist and arc in an impossibly blue sky, their aerial acrobatics set to some ballet music just outside the range of human hearing. They shorten into specks, then disappear, far out to sea, before materializing again in another segment of the horizon.
There is a dog, of course, for what is a daydream about the beach without some mongrel in need of grooming, dashing into the surf to rescue a broken stick? …
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I got your letter the other day. Did you imagine my face when I realized it was your suicide note? The ungodly sound struggling between my lips? The dog running in circles, whining until I started breathing right again?
It’s been more than ten years since you left. I probably don’t have the right to go to pieces like that anymore. But if that were really true, you wouldn’t have written to me at all. Did you do it just to have the last word, like always? Well, I won’t let you this time.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to lecture you. I’ve wasted enough hours trying. I won’t bore you with how I felt when you vanished like a ghost.
The robbery was the second story on the evening news.…
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Grammatically speaking, love is complex and must be handled carefully. As a verb, love can be used in both the active and passive voice, but I most often use it in the active voice, especially if a man’s name is the subject of the sentence, as in John loves me. In this sentence, John is doing the loving and “me” is the recipient of the love–a comforting notion when I’m feeling lonely. Love is also best used in the present tense because if I use the past tense, as in John (or Chris or Mike) loved me, this reminds me that the man in question no longer cares about me, leading to anger and disappointment. If I do speak of a man’s love for me in the past, I usually use the passive voice so that I can easily omit the agent, as in I was loved.…
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He started baling hay at 5:00 that morning, then he and his boys branded cows at 8:00, breakfast missed, again. He’d heft the heifers and throw them down, while a son hit the cow with the hot iron, The Bar Double B, the hair sizzling, smelling like what his Sunday school teacher must have meant by fires of hell, “mephitis” she called it, in her prim voice, all nose and lavender perfume.
After tending the herd, the latter part of the day was spent stringing barbed wire between the post oaks. No lunch, again. Only one torn thumbnail on his left hand; only one burn on his right palm. Not bad for a day’s work. But the sons were off to the city for “real work,” they said, in a bank or insurance job. …
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Friday, 3:02 p.m.
To: v3ng3ful@lunat1c.com
Subject: Break-up
Dear Vengeance,
I’ll just say it. I’m breaking up with you. I just don’t think things are working out between us. Don’t get me wrong; I enjoyed leaving burning paper bags full of unspeakable things on old high school enemies’ porches–probably more than I should–but I don’t think your way of dealing with problems is good for me. And so, as part of my mid-June resolution, I’m going to be honest with you and come clean.
I’ve been seeing Compassion behind your back. I just feel like he’s been giving me such a positive outcome! He doesn’t make me give people bottles full of urine with an Apple Juice label. He doesn’t make me insult people to their face just because they sat in my seat–in fact, he makes me compliment their faces.…
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