On my 33rd birthday, I couldn’t ask my parents for what I really wanted, which was a poison cake. Specifically, a molten lava cake.

Baby knows she’s beautiful. Why else would thousands gather to gawk at her through the glass, day after day after dome-shaped day? After all, nobody flocks to see ugly things.

Every night, in the tender stretch of time between velvety blackness and golden dawn, I spread my legs in bed and hold vigil.

They found her in the morning: sitting stiff in her swivel chair before a trio of glowing monitors, her back flush against the mesh netting, as if her own fine edit had totally blown her away.

The first time I held your hand, we only did it to communicate with the dead.

When I push the door open, I see a trio of yellow-and-blue uniforms crowding the sinks. Three cheerleaders. Six eyes on me.

My words will finally matter. They’ll dominate headlines, debates, academic dissertations. My name—immortalized in print. Etched in stone.

Todd was running low on pot. In the past few weeks, his customers had been buying more frequently and in larger doses, so he was running out way faster than usual. He blamed the times. Actually, he thanked them.

Alex locks eyes with me. Her chest rises and falls slowly beneath her shirt. There are no words between us–just the beat of the song, as driving as the rain.

The star of the movie made her entrance on a gurney. She was a pasty white, little blonde thing who probably weighed one hundred pounds soaking wet, and it looked like about eighty pounds of that was baby.