The warp of beauty

A young woman named Vickie Lynn Hogan went to high school about seventy miles away from me in a small town called Mexia, Texas. She was seven years older, though I like to imagine I passed her at the mall one day,  or that we stood side by side at the makeup counter of Dillard’s, […]

Five short stories about ‘Hustlers’

I I didn’t want to see Hustlers, but my friend gave me two options: Hustlers, or some movie called Peanut Butter Falcon*, so you see I had no real choices. The theater was packed, mostly women in their twenties and thirties, but a fair number of men. A lot of couples, or guys with female […]

Burn cigarettes

This morning I saw two people smoking on a back patio. The image startled me. Of course millions of people smoke old-fashioned cigarettes, I know this. But the ritual of the stolen smoke, the camaraderie of the picnic table — at 9:30am, no less — was like a frame lifted from an earlier era. As […]

Modern Romances

I was wandering around an antiques store in Checotah, Oklahoma (home of Carrie Underwood) when I came across this magazine. $10,000 in cash prizes. Love at 40. OK, I’m listening. I’d never heard of Modern Romances magazine, but I picked up the copy, which was sheathed in protective plastic, and I searched for the issue […]

A hideaway in the mists of cyberspace

In the spring of 2001, I decided to start my own website. Actually, I decided to quit my job at the Austin paper, travel to Ecuador to learn Spanish, and also start my own website, where I planned to share stories of my adventures. I didn’t like the idea of spamming my friend circle with […]

Saturday in New York City

Last Saturday morning, I woke before dawn in the cozy loft bedroom of my friends’ Tribeca apartment. For mysterious reasons, I’ve been waking up early for the past two months, sometimes as early as 3:30am. I badly wish I could sleep longer, but I’ve also grown fond of these dim and hushed hours before the […]

Pictures of people with their eyes closed

I bought a framed portrait of a woman at a vintage store several years ago. I had been walking through an aisle crowded with peeling cabinets and rusty kitchen utensils when the portrait grabbed me. The woman’s eyes were closed, but she was smiling, and I wondered what the story was behind this disjunction, between the deliberate […]

The gala, alone

I was trying to get a picture of the red neon pegasus outside the Omni Hotel. I was standing on the sidewalk, in my high heels and the dress I’d worn to the gala, angling my phone to capture the Reunion Tower in the background, whose lights were flickering in such a way that if […]

Status

I wish I could remember how she came to me, what detail opened the door that I would walk through to meet her. Did we have a friend in common? Did she name-drop some magazine? This would have been 2011, or thereabouts, and my inbox was a game of whack-a-mole, where the moles were always […]

Little slips of paper that might have contained your future

In my senior year of college, I took a playwriting class. We were given slips of paper with dramatic scenarios and told to write a few pages of a scene. It’s been nearly two decades since I read the information on that strip of paper, selected from a pile, and though I cannot be certain, […]