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My Ugly Bathroom
Photograph by Sarah Miller. My bathroom is ugly. My bathroom is so ugly that when I tell people my bathroom is ugly and they say it can’t be that ugly I always like to show it to them. Then they come...
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Full-Length Mirror
Mirror piece, 1965. Art & Language. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 4.0. My thirty-fourth year was meant to be a winner. I would drink less, I would eat better, I would write my...
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The Dust
Photograph by Christopher Chang. Where I live is about twenty minutes from anywhere else in Los Angeles. What this actually means is that I live ten minutes from anything when there’s no traffic, and...
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My Curtains, My Radiator
Photograph by Mitchell Johnson. I moved to Chicago late last summer and spent my first evening alone scrubbing and rescrubbing an old dresser I had found in the basement of my new apartment. It was...
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An Egyptian Vase
Photograph by Jago Rackham. On the top of our fiction bookshelf is an alabaster vase. Its rim is broken. Inside it is a single dried flower, and beside it a faux peach, under a large bell jar. The vase...
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Rear Window, Los Feliz
Photograph by Claudia Ross. A sign on the dried grass in front of my apartment building named it the Isles of Charm, a label that suggested—correctly—the irony of the complex’s eventual decay. I moved...
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The Hole
Photograph by Nicolaia Rips. When he walked into my bedroom for the first time, he pointed at the top right corner of the room. “What is that?” The answer was a hole. Directly above my closet and...
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Apartment Four
Photograph by Jacqueline Feldman. One spring evening I pulled in and saw my neighbor Stefanie was sitting on her car, which has the next spot over, with a friend. It was possible to worry for a second...
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The Sofa
Berthe Morisot, On the Sofa, ca. 1882. Public domain. In the months in which death swooped down on my father, circling on some days, and on others, its talons gripping the bars of the hospital bed...
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Ripping Ivy
Ivy. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CCO 2.0. When we moved into our little house, the large beds of English ivy in the front yard didn’t bother me much. It’s not what I would have...
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