I signed up for the trial because it paid well. I saw it online, the ad. Participants needed for a biomedical research study. Details were sparse, even after my phone call with them. Even after my initial interview, where I kept my expression obediently neutral as they had me take off my shoes and itchy jumper so they could weigh me, and I lied about my smoking habits.

I could have drowned this couple in the kidney bean-shaped swimming pool.

Except I’m not the killing type, I have a sensitive stomach, always have, it’s a thing that’s plagued me my whole life. I wait for the Ramseys to finish their hunt and poke of the garish entertaining room that doubles as a pool room in the warmer months—but let’s not kid, it’s the same thing, the warmer months in LA are every month, it’s no colder than sixty-five degrees in January, not like where I’m from. I give them the appropriate amount of time while I stare through the sliding glass doors, and I picture her: a woman not unlike Norma Desmond floating face down, arms like goalposts, her black and gold housecoat billowing in the crystalline blue water, her headwrap half-undone, a tendril tugging her towards the deep end.

Sunny, mid-afternoon Friday. Before all our fathers came home with belts, before pissing into manhole vents for kicks, before ghosts in the graveyard, our neighbor, Jerry, at whose wall we’d thrown and watched shatter bricks, GI Joes, and rotten walnut rinds, finally moved out. He piled all of his trash on the street and left rapture fast. An hour or two at most. I’ve never packed up and split that fast in my life.

There are certain things one would prefer not to imagine. For example the moment she discovered the poor thing, whose name was Humbert, half-shredded by the neighbor-dog, with whom we had been on friendly relations preceding that point. P

The first time my girl and I kissed, it was so sudden—my arm shot out, knocking the milkshake we were sharing from its perch on the dash. For a moment, I imagined my mother’s anger, her beloved 1999 Honda Accord puddled with pink, but then the truth shuffled forward, breathing hot from its mouth. The car was mine now. My sole inheritance. The milkshake splashed across our laps but I was still trembling from our collision of lip and spit and tit, and barely noticed the thick cream oozing cold between our legs, down the crevices of the console, penetrating the seatbelt. It never buckled the same after that, only latching when it was wiggled just right

Claire had been trying to get her son, Colton, to stop harassing Rod Stewart online. She took away his phone and returned it after a conversation in the kitchen during which Colton's contrition, regret, and claim that he didn’t understand the vulgar sexual metaphors he had used struck Claire as entirely theatrical. This was a ruse or ploy so transparent it made her feel like a bad mother. She and Colton stood on opposite sides of the oak countertop. Colton tried to look like he might cry as she raised her voice. Claire thought she ought to have raised a better liar than this—and felt a twinge of regret herself.

The device promised peace. For the price, Liz was willing to try it. Over the kitchen sink, she fiddled with the package. The device looked like the ankle monitor she had worn in high school, when she had gotten drunk on strawberry wine and crashed the neighbor’s ATV. This device was smaller than that, slim like a phone.

Brian hadn’t listened to Achtung Baby in 25 years, but the baby was teething, and he'd taken to dropping the boy into the car seat and pulling up the album on his phone and driving around until the kid wore himself out, which he did almost every night right around “So Cruel.” On this night in particular, however, Brian kept on driving, past “Ultraviolet,” straight through “Acrobat,” and all the way to the end of “Love is Blindness.”

Months ago. July. Afternoon sundogs and a slaughter of fruit between us.

My husband and I lay grocery store ads and campaign mailers across the cement porch and have our way with the watermelons. Every season brings lessons. Summer’s is a vivid hunger.

it doesn’t go well, and their offspring, an angry nest of centipedes that prefers living in dreadlocks, warm and cozy, rebels against screams of walk this way, talk this way—

Regina smoked a borrowed Kool. She was tired, hot, feeling all the weight the Mississippi late June sky gave. Peter was back in jail, so it was just her and the kids, and now as she smoked every bit of her cigarette, she watched Johnny, Tammy, Rosedale, and Lil Pete play in the red dirt. Maybe if she was inside, not smoking, the two Cadillacs and cargo van would have kept driving. But she was outside, watching the kids clump around in the Mississippi clay, holding mentholated smoke in her mouth as long as she could before exhaling it into the still air that hung over everything.

They are recalling my baby. I explain this with a sardonic head wag when my boss asks why I need to leave early. He is faulty.

On Tuesday, my 4-year-old son came home from school with bite marks—three red, swollen crescent moons trailing up his arm like animal tracks.

Deirdre has no idea how to stop this. Could just say ‘stop’, she reminds herself, but no, look: Lisa’s already dimming the lights and everyone’s already setting aside their yellow squares of cake, preparing to summon the dead. The group of five women gather about Heather’s round, glass-top table, clearing it of balled wrapping paper and plastic champagne coups, bedazzled dick-shaped water guns and stray giftbags.

I know I am approaching burnout because when the crows land in our front yard, it reminds me of what it was like to be young and drunk. To be buried in a mess of limbs, slick with glitter. To be carried by the music, by girls you knew and girls you didn’t, everything blurry and iridescent.

Mama says, “Punk is what you got between your toes. It creeps in when your feet get hot and can’t breathe, like when you keep your shoes and socks on for too long and your feet get clammy. It’s their way of saying, ‘Give me some air.’”

“Your hair's a rat’s nest,” the woman said, her imitation silk kimono gaping to reveal a bony chest and the inner edges of small, torpedo-shaped breasts. She held an ashtray in one hand and a gold-tipped cigarette in the other. The child ran a hand through her halo of dark hair.

Every few months Mom made a trip to Kam Man Market to restock the pantry essentials: bottles of fish sauce that stunk like Bruce’s football socks, shrimp paste that smelled of sweet fermentation, among an abundance of other condiments that would make all my classmates pinch their noses.

Fire crackles, short and cuppin’ heat in curled hands. Room is warm, is small and tired, and sittin’ crouched by open hearth is Daddy, sleepin' at baby’s side—both tucked away by the fire-place, tryna suck in that warmth.