All That Junk

Nonfiction. MarchXness. 2024.

“In June of 2005, I’m hired as a hostess by Gladstone’s Long Beach, a seafood restaurant Downtown. I’d previously worked at a clam chowder deli during breaks from college, and I embellished the experience on my resume, hoping to be hired as a server. I wanted to be a server because my dorm suitemate was a server in Downtown Long Beach at a brewery a couple blocks from Gladstone’s. After she started serving, she had the things I wanted: True Religion Jeans, the same Jimmy Choo heels that SJP wears in Sex and the City, a rosary tattoo inked by Opie Ortiz from Sublime fame at American Beauty Tattoo in Sunset Beach, a first-edition LAMB sweater (unlike the knockoff from Buffalo Exchange I wore), and a Juicy Couture purse with its own branded box and protective cover.”

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Roadmap: Listening to Fiona Apple in Santa Maria, California

Nonfiction. Off Assignment, 2023.

1996, Tidal

Santa Maria, California

I buy this CD from the Kmart on Santa Maria Way with a friend the summer before 6th grade. We walk to the store via a shortcut behind the thoroughfare without her parents as chaperones. My family lives across town, so we return to her house for the first listen. Summers are like this: my mother shuffles me to a friend’s house, and I start to equate car rides and leaving home with something fun.

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READ “BEHIND THE ESSAY” INTERVIEW.

Notes on Endurance

Nonfiction. MarchXness 2023.

“I’m not sure how the song found a place on blank Sony CD-R, track #1. I was only two years old when T’Pau’s “Heart and Soul” reached #4 on The Billboard Hot 100, too young for Pepe Jeans. Growing up, my favorite babysitter was Vh1, so I had a stronghold on many one hit wonders from the 1980s, reciting information I had learned from Behind the Music and Pop-Up Video. Still, this particular 1987 hit escaped me.”

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Reverse Fuck, an excerpt

Novel excerpt. 86 Logic Magazine. 2022.

ORDER HERE.

Half-Moon Teeth

Short Story. Boston Review. 2022.

Semi-Finalist in the 2021 Aura Estrada Short Fiction Contest, judged by Kali Fajardo-Anstine.

“Night. My ceiling rips open, and water from the roof pours in. The lights are off, and I reach under the covers. My hands are cold. The sheets and blankets are cold. There’s a spark of light, and thunder groans. I peek at the sky, and rain trickles in. I’m inside a room, inside an apartment, but the noise is as if I were outside in its thickness; the water makes a dull slap as it hits the mattress. When I flick the light on, my ceiling hangs open, a wide mouth. Strips of paint like tusks.”

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Stray

Short Story. Emerald City Literary Mag. 2022.

“It was the Sous Chef, Valentino, who first told Pepper he had heard cats in the afternoon during prep. He was the only one clocked in that early, hours before service, organizing the meats and vegetables for each dinner shift.”

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January 2020

Flash Nonfiction. Sledgehammer Lit. 2021.

“On the first day of Spring semester, I ask my students about obsessions because they want to be writers, and it’s good to feel hooked.”

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No Sauce

Flash nonfiction. Taco Bell Quarterly. 2021.

“We wait for our orders. Dark grey sweats folded over a black leotard, pink tights inside out so the back-seam shows from upstage. We are starving: a thirty-minute break from the day’s long rehearsal.”

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What Jeanie Won't Tell

Short Story, The Journal (2017).

"Jeanie doesn't tell me that she strips for Frank sometimes to make a couple extra bucks."

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Prep

Flash Fiction, Pithead Chapel (2017).

"He is the first to clock in, his keys into the door behind the restaurant in the alley, the one that’s later propped open with a brick for the rest."

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Not With a Bang

Flash Fiction, Redivider (2017).

"We are twelve—no thirteen—twenty-four—only three bodies of all crayons, male and female, straight and crooked, tired and with stamina, we are makers, we are art, we are writing everything down."

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*Third Place Winner in the 2016 Redivider Blurred Genre Contest, judged by Claudia Rankine.

The Stars at Night are Big and Bright

Flash Fiction, Passages North (2017).

"We take speed in Marfa and the star-spiced sky explodes into gumdrops..."

*finalist for the 2016 Passages North Neutrino Short Short Award

Patent Pieces

Three short fictions, Nano Fiction (2016).

*published in the concluding issue of Nano Fiction.

Three interconnected short fictions inspired by a book of patents from February 19, 1963. These pieces were written in collaboration with printmaker and photographer Victoria Marie Bee for Jon Whitfill's traveling exhibit, Patent Pending.

Speak Easy So We Can Hear You

Flash Fiction, WhiskeyPaper, 2015.

"We measure our nights by the rooms we give in."

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Hands Come In From Every Direction

Short Story, Juked, 2015.

"Jeanie passed the embryo on a Saturday night in the employee bathroom. She felt a cramp, a sharp pain in her abdomen, and left her tray of wine glasses on the food-line, burgundy residue dotting each stem."

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Other Than Holding

Flash Fiction, Literary Orphans, 2014

"He gives you a nostalgic fuck so sweet it makes your teeth ache."

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Sit Pretty

Flash Fiction, CHEAP POP, 2014.

"After the examination—the heels in stirrups, knees toward opposing walls, the scoot your bottom down, closer to the edge, that’s it—the doctor smiled."

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