She double checks with me. “La lenguas? You want tongue?” What she means to say is, white people don’t order tongue burritos. I just nod and wait for my order. The dimly-lit, late-night Mexican joint just a few blocks from my house is nearly empty. Only a young couple and I occupy the small dining room. I think it’s past midnight. At least one. But I'm hungry.

The husband has a face designed by an architect. Cassidy has never seen a mouth so full of teeth. She knew what the husband looked like, based on tagged photos and the blessed luck of the wayback machine, but to watch him thoughtfully chew an oyster mushroom is something else. Someone previously perceived as static now in motion.

“Are you sure you won’t have anything?” he asks.

“If I eat something, will I be trapped here forever?

June decided against wearing the new shoes eventually; she reckoned that if her feet were sore she might look funny when she walked, it wouldn’t be cool. She had such a miserable experience more than once before. The streets in Hong Kong were not really easy to walk with high heels, she’d avoid getting herself in trouble with a bunch of her college classmates. June put on her sneakers and took off, hoping there would be occasions later for her shiny green mary jane.

It’s always rainy up here, which is no good for the house. The walls will rot, things will crawl in. If my daughter changes into a newt, I won’t know what to do. 

The man washed the egg. A white, wet egg. He cradled it wherever he went the way people do before an egg toss. But the man did not plan on tossing this egg. He planned to protect it for reasons he could not understand.

When I left, I was just starting to come down, and coming down from uppers is probably the worst thing anyone can experience: all of your body except your heart and your brain is ready to go to sleep. It’s better if you have benzos on hand, but they were hard to come by…

Once more, she hands you the wrong order; this time, the iced vanilla latte is a small and your bagel hasn’t been toasted. You flag her down and ask her to correct it. She apologizes, and two minutes later, you leave Carol’s Coffee Shop, shaking the ice around your drink, listening to the cubes bob up and down. But the latte tastes watery, and your bagel is a smidge burnt.

The new girl said it so much that the woman got tired of hearing it. She tried tuning it out but it came out of her mouth everywhere. The new girl hit the wrong button or gave back too much change — "I’m sorry, I'm new here." She used the wrong broom to sweep or folded the credit card applications the wrong way (they’d gotten in trouble for making the fold where the interest information was) — "I’m sorry, I’m new here." 

The first time I saw her was a month before the shutdown. She sat in the overgrown backyard surrounded by antique furniture. She barely moved and ignored people passing. A chill rushed through me, believing her a ghost.

There’s Styrofoam plates in our laps with meatloaf and applesauce teetering the edges. I feel something sticky on the inside of my wrist and notice some of the sauce has toppled onto it. Before I can wipe it off the dog makes haste and licks it up. My wife drops her fork at the same time and I watch as a small piece of her chin falls off and smacks against the floor.

“It’s okay— Maureen will clean it up.”

My cousin drives a Kia Forte, and I don’t even know what that means. She was born and raised in the suburbs of Pennsylvania, and she was captain of her high school’s debate team. She knows how to roll a blunt (“In theory,” she told me with a wink). Her father owns a bar, and her mother knows Amanda Seyfried. My cousin has been to parties that end with people having their stomachs pumped. My cousin has never had her stomach pumped. She’s going to Yale.

We didn’t have any pets. We had full ashtrays on the counters and empty gin bottles around the sink. The walls were bare. There was a crack in the bay window where the glass had been caulked cheaply. The cold slithered through with a sardonic whistle we pretended not to hear. My mother bought us a snake plant. She repotted it and said it needed water once a week but we never gave it any. It became a cactus.

The next day, same place, the same moment, I found him, still struggling, yet with another slice. It flew through the space and descended on the floor at the foot of his stool. He bent to seize it and placed it back on his plate. A small frown appeared on his forehead with a grimace. I smiled at his demeanor of discontent; he resumed with the incisions around the edges, in the middle, this way or that until a puny piece, was forked again between his frontals. “Bloody hell!” he swore under his breath. “Why is it so hard to cut a piece of bread?

The West Coast Boyfriend has dated models. I am not a model. So I’m going to pedicure my toes and manicure my fingers and wax my eyebrows and my mustache and my armpits and my legs and my pussy and my asshole. I’m going to shoot toxins into my forehead and under my eyes that force my muscles to stop working so there aren’t any more wrinkles.

On a Wednesday, my one day off from the boutique each week, I walked over to the small blue house where the painter was waiting for me. I’d met her in the boutique on that previous Sunday. She was one of those patrons who wasn’t content to let you rest behind the counter, to handle the business of shopping herself, but rather one to whom browsing should be a social activity, a chance to monopolize the attention of the sales attendant, to ask about that such item or this one, to ask about how you liked working there, and tell you about her own troubles while she rolled sample perfume onto her wrist.

If she dropped the milk, right now, and it hit the linoleum floor with a thud, and it's purple lid popped off, and the milk surged out with quick gasps of air, who would notice? If she let the Lucky Charms and the Band-Aids drop in the shallow flood of milk and she walked through the Employees Only entrance and out the receiving dock and kept walking, who would notice?

I thought maybe it had been a full moon but it wasn’t, and anyway, I don’t know shit about what that means. You used to talk a lot about the phases of the moon, the stars’ place, Mercury and its retrograde, but I never really understood anything about what they meant. Maybe I didn’t listen well enough when you talked about things you were passionate about, a considerable regret.

Soup Plate. White and pure. Thrown like a frisbee at back of husband’s head, husband who had just become a father. A flying saucer arced the air, approaching its target with an edge, thin and obtuse. Plate shattered at contact with the base of his skull, by the hardness of the husband-father’s head. Later, sweeping the shards, post-partum belt pressing into my belly, husband left, stayed mad for days, maybe years. “You could have brain-damaged me!” he said.

Notnitz brought a friend to see The Turin Horse at a microcinema. Afterwards, as they stopped by the ticket booth so that he could check whether the film would be showing again, he wondered aloud how such a slow bleak film could be so exhilarating. “And wasn’t the hot potato scene sort of hilarious, at least the first time?” It must not have been the right moment to introduce the friend to windswept Hungarian cinema, however. She reached into the pocket of her jeans, extracted a Chapstick, and stuck it in one of her nostrils.

His trip into the past could not be made without the ticket he bought in the present. That ticket they slid to him through the booth’s small window was full of memory and magic, and he cupped it in his hands like he held summer’s first lovesick lightning bug.