In Honduras, beer is cheaper than water, They would boast to the green arrivals. These men didn’t care about beer or water. But they couldn’t say, In Honduras, life is cheaper than money. We were all still pretending.

He loves the city when it’s sleeping, when all the lights are off and if you listen you can hear the Pacific wearing the continent away. He hears the bus coming. It sounds like a ghost moving towards him. He closes his eyes, breathes in the fog. One night, way back in Honduras, ghosts had […]

“I need you to organize the shelves tonight,” my boss says an hour before the end of my shift. “All of them?” I say. “As many as you can.” I think of the immensity of the project. Payroll keeps getting cut. Some of the sections haven’t been organized since before Christmas—Literature bleeds into Romance, the […]

I was down in the basement, in the room where I grew up. My father stood silently at the top of the stairs watching me pack dirty laundry neatly into my duffel bag. We were going on a trip. He wanted to say something. I finished packing and went up the stairs, went quickly around […]

denver. i was in that square state for four days and didn’t see a single fucking mountain. it looked like kansas in the middle of winter with all the clouds and fog and flat dead grass. and me and a friend got kicked out of a bar in boulder for smoking weed. fuck that state.

I put everything you gave me into a jar. I emptied it into the ocean today. Except the quarter. I dropped the quarter into a bus and rode down to Market Street.

A cable car was blocking the intersection and all I could think was, “Come on, Muni, get that fucking tourist trap moving so I can bike through.” San Francisco doesn’t charm me the way it used to.

“This is the autumn, it will break your heart.” —Hans Fallada The Drinker

Private Richard Henry watched a formation of birds flying overhead in the clear blue sky. They flew high, towards the heavy mountains covered with snow and fog, and he couldn’t hear them talking to each other. He wondered how cold it was up there, wondered how the birds kept going. Because it was very cold […]

Henry and Woods drove Martin’s truck through a thick fog to the motor pool. They were the lowest ranking soldiers in the squad, so while Martin and Matson got to watch movies in the large white tent at the bottom of the hill, they had to change the oil or clean the bathroom or spend […]