It's the middle of winter. My last submission was rejected with good cause. It went a little off the deep end.

Congratulations! Your employer is an open-minded, inclusive institution that has discovered a method to ensure the comfort of their gender non-conforming employees, and that method is buttons.

A woman waited in line in front of me, anxiously watching the television behind the plexiglass partition. The gas station attendant broke rolls of quarters in half and dropped them into the register. A second woman spoke on screen, dressed in an orange pant suit, matching neon lipstick and a gold crescent moon pinned to her lapel below her microphone. I imagined the petroleum-wax scent her breath might leave as she spoke.          

Can imagine it: black vans with windows tinted green like bug eyes, all those bodies stolen away like women in wartime. 

In memory, we wanted to repost this gem from 2014 by Amanda Goldblatt that used Mary Tyler Moore as a lens to become a "review of friendship."

As a houseguest, I sucked. I acted like I was doing them a favor by living there, but in reality I would have been destitute without their hospitality.

Later that evening, when confronted about my absence, I told her that my grandfather said I looked sick and should go home. His senility always made him my reliable scapegoat.

...the products we couldn't get here. They'd come home with stories of innocent smiles given to bored border guards while they wore two pairs of jeans under three dresses. The trunk of their car filled with Cherry Coke and flavours of chips we couldn't comprehend. Cheap rum. Meat. Cigarettes. Electronics. 

Everything is cosmically predestined when you are stoned. She put off the trip as long as she could, eating three-day old pasta out of Tupperware. This is what they mean by mind-numbing. This is some strong shit.

I look across the street. I can see the bookstore. It’s right there. I think about kicking my way through the wall, making a sprint across the street. All before the marching band closing in comes stomping into view. Because after that I'm sunk. The flood gates will be open. And the entirety of the county's Christmas spirit will be let loose like a foul bowel movement from the asshole of a very old drunk. I decide against it.

The first seven years we dolled ourselves up as witches in black nylon and swampy grease paint.

It’s time.

My novel is my father, I am saying, and it too is the best art I could make but not the best art I will make. For I am 33 and my feminist Jungian therapist says often: the beginning of adulthood is forgiving your parents for their sundry errors.

The next day I send the above photo to a friend in Michigan. She asks if I'm fine. And what the doctor recommended. My response is typed laughter. I tell her I've been taking it easy. Staying medicated. But the chance of seeing a doctor is slim. The hospitals are over run. She's a little surprised. It's contrary to what she's been told.

I am reading a poem called “George Washington” in a book of poems called George Washington in a bar called The Library in the Lower East Side of Manhattan where I am spending my last twelve dollars on four beers and my last four dollars on tipping the bartender because happy hour still hasn't started.

But if it's anything like years passed it'll boil down to something real simple. Start drinking as soon as the coffee is done. Bottles of beer and wine. We'll wrap ourselves up in blankets to stave off the cold. Too cheap to turn on the portable radiators we use to heat our place. Her parents will call. We'll feign sobriety. A hard thing to do at 10:00 a.m. with wine-stained lips.

I understand this. This is what made me psychic. This is what makes images arrive on the doorstep with a bindle over the shoulder made of red bandana. Each man is the last man.

Christopher Boucher’s new novel, Golden Delicious (Melville House), is a kind of referendum on all we presently hold dear in fiction. Its emotional hold on the reader is very strong, but its avant-garde methods critique those special effects by explaining what they’re doing to your feelings while they do it, which somehow only makes the book more sad.

I have a thing for droopy-eyed men.

I won’t apologize for trying to forget the days I spent with you, riding pillion on your Honda, inhaling Bombay’s foggy polluted streets, sitting on rickety wooden benches of hole-in-the-wall Indo-Chinese joints, slurping Szechwan noodles and sipping Tom Yum soup, strolling on Juhu’s wet sandy beaches, letting the ocean wash our feet.

A girl on my train is watching Kylie Jenner’s snapchat. I lean in and watch over her shoulder. I can't hear, but it doesn't really matter.

I found out I was pregnant in the bathroom of a wine bar. 

I try to turn everything into a metaphor so I don’t have to face it straight on.

Things to remember:

Ghost Deer, Ohio

Ray St. Ray

The walls, statues, and shrines of the New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum are covered in offerings to the spirits—or loa—represented within. Plaques have pennies and dimes resting on their frames; there is a wishing stump filled with dollar bills. And there is lip-gloss everywhere.