Last week, while walking a lazy lap around Echo Park Lake, I overheard a lady scolding her dog as she fed the ducks. “No, that’s not for you. Stop that,” she said to her boisterous companion: a handsome black Lab with a puppy’s playful eyes. The lady’s hair was bleached blonde. She wore cat-eye glasses […]
This work has been selected from an ongoing series, Leisure Seizure.
Theres a lot of weird stuff out there, some of the objects were created to promote long gone businesses, abandoned building projects or doomed theme parks. Some of it is simply an act of whimsy. […]
The many voices are taking over the mono-voice. For fuck’s sake, let them. ~Lidia Yuknavitch, December 2015, speaking at AULA I was raised under the prism of an American myth. My father taught me what it meant to be American. He was an officer in the United States […]
Fred Moten’s writing is being lost. Or found. Or the kind of lost you want—the wind whipping through trees in Alabama or words that come in meaningful bursts, though you are unsure of the meaning or the source of the bursts. You reel in a mad maelstrom of feeling, entirely precognitive but at once familiar, […]
You have a waking nightmare, one that is recurring. You find yourself once again among the crowd at Disneyland pushing your small children before you in a double-wide stroller. (No, this is not the extent of the nightmare.) Everyone is steaming; everyone has theme-park fatigue and the solution is always to find a nice long […]
(flash creative nonfiction) [Fix] The one time I met Dad’s dad, he pissed in Mom’s closet. Grandpa George liked speedballs—cocaine and heroin in the same syringe. He liked prostitutes—the power of purchase was the one he abused most readily. But most of all Grandpa George liked Music—and Music liked him back, God knows why. […]
(flash fiction) As a girl of seven, she was told to pretend the stranger was her father. Fake passports and stories to match, enough to fool an inquisitive customs officer. At first, she’d wondered whether coming to America meant she’d get a different father. A father who was there, not just a name to put […]
(flash creative nonfiction) I found a fledgling in the yews in the side yard when I was eight or nine. He was covered in bird lice, and shit down my arm as I washed him clean with the hose. I still remember the heat of it. His big, dumb eyes blinking in the light. He […]
(flash fiction) Hi! Thank G-d I’m a busy writer, wife, mom, and grandmom. I joined GobbledUp several years ago. During that entire time, I elected not to take advantage of the many freebie upgrades you’ve offered me because of my high number of connections. Truth is, I’ve also been too busy to learn all of […]
In the introduction to his essay anthology, About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory, Barry Lopez describes becoming a writer and finding his voice. He writes of the universality of story in all cultures, a binding theme in this collection: “Stories do not give instruction, they do not explain how to love a companion […]
(flash fiction) Because the white boy had saved me from drowning, my father invited him to dinner. He brought his six closest friends with him and three newcomers—including a girl. I’d never seen him with a girl before. She floated like a cloud by his side, pale as the moonlight by which we dined, and […]
I began drafting this essay at the end of the presidential election season, in light of what many of us thought would be a landmark historical moment: the United States’ election of our first woman president. On November 8, as we are all too aware, despite winning the popular vote by (as of this writing) […]
(flash fiction) I’m making cookies from scratch and I’m confused. But I’m here, cookbook in hand and flour in bowl, pretending to be something I’m not. Because I’m in love with a boy and I’m losing him. He likes girls who cook from scratch, who are serene, who have ponytails that bounce when they walk. […]
L’Angoisse qui fait les fous. L’Angoisse qui fait les suicidés. ANTONIN ARTAUD III. A HORIZONTAL JOB ++++Poor Miguel Ángel. I’ve always said he had the worst luck. There are lucky dogs—but he’s one unlucky dog. ++++He had looked for work. The offices emery-polished and the banks full. He had looked with the utmost sadness. ++++One […]
“The stench was awful again.” I hear her talking in bed as I shave. “I might have gotten used to it. I’m not sure.” “I don’t understand how someone can get used to something so disgusting and unbearable.” I believed that the unbearable stench in the apartment was affecting our sex life. We were making […]
My wife asks me to leave the porch light on before bed. I ask if we are expecting guests; she says it’s to keep them away. There was a time a flame in a window was a welcome mat, a compass in the dark. Tradition has a way of unraveling the longer it lasts. Think candles […]
(flash fiction) After her heart attack Barbara returned to the island. She knew very well that the helicopter—if available—would take twenty minutes from the mainland. She went straight to the stoned guy on the beach who did winters in India, and bought a purple sarong. Barbara sunbathed nude, it was heartening—heartening!—and her ropey body soon gleamed. Friends […]
Harry Dodge is an American sculptor, performer, video artist, and author, whose work crosses genres and mediums, and flows through a variety of philosophical questions while addressing intermediacy, relation, materiality, and the unnamable. In the early nineties, Dodge was one of the founders of the San Francisco community-based performance space, The Bearded Lady, which served as […]
July is obscenely hot, but the air conditioning broke two weeks ago and their mother won’t let them leave the house, so they suffer quietly. Felix sits on the plastic-covered couch, poking at the remote control with his toes, flipping from Maury to PBS to the station that only ever plays novellas. There is thin […]
Paul hates talking on the phone so Connie’s the one who calls his daughter-in-law once a month to catch up. She doesn’t mind calling Vicky. She likes hearing about the grandkids growing up too fast in the new house in Simi Valley where they’ve never been invited. Emily’s ten and Noah is almost eight. “He’s […]
The evening flares, the cat naps on a beam. Someone is praying: “Lord Jesus.” The twilight blazes, the fog kindles; There is a scarlet curtain over the ornate window. Spider webs stretch from the golden toolshed. Somewhere a mouse is scratching in a closed cage… By the forest meadow—bundles of wheat. Firs, like spears, rest […]
The first time I visit her, she lies in bed at the far end of the hall where residents with the worst kinds of dementia are placed, where the man in room 308 rigidly slumps in a geri-chair, eyes and mouth open wide as if in a trance, where the wild-haired woman in room 309 […]
I’m beyond your peripheral vision / so you might want to turn your head ~Ani DiFranco The night before Thanksgiving in 1995, while driving home from college, my friends and I were pulled over in my ’73 VW Bus. The State Troopers claimed to smell pot as their probable cause to search. Though we had smoked […]
We traded snippets about ourselves when the chaos allowed and found we’d both joined the Corps to make something of ourselves, serve our country, and shoot things—Schnieder wanted to be a Rifleman while I was already slated to be a Machine Gunner. Before enlisting, Schnieder had been a degenerate living in his parents’ basement. I’d […]
August 1981, and someone’s killing
couples from Santa Barbara
to Sacramento. A woman called Linda
sits with her boyfriend
beneath the buzz of a motel sign
drinking coffee in the yawning summer.
This is the year they drove the Pacific coast
through towns where men lay hobbled,
(flash fiction) I knew Nick before we had words. Our mothers met in childbirth class. They were seated next to each other in the circle. They struck up a conversation and had such a good time talking they almost forgot the solid forms of their husbands, who sat behind them, legs spread, each supporting his […]
The People wanted a reality television star to be their leader and we have to take responsibility for creating that. It was 2003 when the first season of The Bachelor aired. Girls were on their hind legs like animals begging to be picked for a rose. Jerry-Springer-type talk shows began their de-evolution into hysterical chanting […]
— The sea is so blue, the valley so deep. That’s why sadness goes far and wide. But you must stare it in the eye. Only by braving it will you outgrow the child and be an adult. To the children at Gangkou Elementary School, Hualien County, Taiwan. Ina often calls my name on this […]
You started it. Last Thursday. Under the stairway next to the cafeteria door, there was a spot where the cameras don’t reach. The security guard was probably staring at a freshmen girl’s butt. You must have slipped right past him. I noticed it on my way to the bathroom. When I walked by, the security […]
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