The house makes me breathless. Giant glass windows and tastefully curated furniture, a blank canvas for the lives we want to project. Matching stemware, fluffy ...
For our first date, Ryan took me on a lakeside picnic. He picked me up in his boxy Toyota with a basket full of things he’d made himself—veggie wraps, salads in...
G was back from Berlin and texted, so I went to his place. The 3 to the L, ears popping below the East River. It was August and muggy. More gray had crept into ...
Harper is waiting outside the restaurant when I get there, waving at me with her small hand, which is disproportionate to the rest of her body. I’m cradling my ...
In the morning when I wake up my first thought is whether I have gone unvisited in the night. I double-check my body in the mirror, but it is devoid of the whit...
I married the breakup robot. Her name was Lucia. She’d been rented by Joan, my girlfriend of seven years, who’d tired of our relationship but didn’t feel like g...
“Conceived,” Uncle Kev said, “when the Emperor Augustus was sampling a rare vintage from one of his cisalpine estates and found out that three of Rome’s finest ...
Get An Ego
Ego? Boom! You're already done with step 1. Wasn’t that easy? Id? Superego? I don’t know what those are—unimportant psycho babble. If you have you...
Of all the apocalypses on the cards, I draw the climate crisis on my twenty-first birthday. It could have been worse. The Silvers across the street got the dogp...
I suppose most of what happened was my fault. It started with an argument at a party. Martha Henrickson was my girlfriend. I’d planned on falling head over heel...
I'm starting a gameshow called Tyler Dempsey Has a Gameshow. I play Tyler. I get an agent. The agent says get some money. Get some money, then we'll talk about ...
A few weeks after arriving in M—, weeks during which I encountered many locals but made no lasting connections, I decided to join a long-distance runn...
Spiders are as unique and varied as humanity, if I may be so bold to say. Their behavior is more predictable, so with just a few close looks you can learn many ...
On a sultry summer night, Timothee Chalamet showed up at the doorstep. Traces of sand particles on his curly black hair. His ash-grey warrior-like outfit carrie...
It’s my birthday today. I am now officially 39 years old, unemployed, and still living in my family home along with my mother. I have no friends and any form of...
When I needed a special service, I thought of Rick. Rick was odd: a fear addict, for want of a better term. He was notorious in the crowd he ran with for the qu...
Istanbul is not only known, as the ignorant foreigner might think, for its many mosques, its syrupy pastries, or its myriad of grand steam baths and even grande...
It was 10:34 on a Tuesday morning when the news came out. Less than an hour later, the headlines had already gone global, leaving the internet aghast, full of q...
The truth is he was a lousy fuck. Not that you’d know it from his demeanor. Like the way he would strut around stark-naked right in front of me and yank the fru...
Everyone carries a ghost in their back pocket. There are no rules about how many you can own but most people find enough companionship with one, perhaps two. No...
“Excuse me, sir.” The man in pink hoodie approached me when I stepped out of the subway. His eyes got greener and creepier up close, and he looked shorter than ...
High Card Hand
Brushing up on the usual ways of losing as you do— and do well by local reputation— this is the worst hand, worst of the sorriest bunc...
The letters began arriving by the dozens shortly after my picture appeared in the paper, sealed with lipstick blots and doused in acrid perfume. “It’s called hy...
Because you think you just might die. And because—if you’re being honest—you want the lies. Of course you need the answers, too, but just the ones that let you ...
What was your reaction when you learned the universe was a computer program? Was it despair? Solipsism? A yearning for the old world? Or are you one of those ho...
In Etta’s wardrobe there is a typewriter. She can hear the clack clack clack ping! while she tries to sleep. In her dreams, its ribbons coil her up and smudge h...
We drove out to Fig’s place to see about Holiday, who owed Vaughn some money, I guess. They were on the outs again, but Holiday was still crashing there. I coul...