Zazen

Someone was throwing glitter in the air and it rained on me and I started crying. I always cry at Pride. I can’t help it. It’s like everything’s going to be all right and it’s all going to end well. I just can’t take it.

Grace hates veganism. She calls it an elitist enclave for white people to lie to themselves about their role in the cycle of consumption.

Raina says nothing’s ever really wrong it’s just the story we tell ourselves. I think it’s the other way around. But I tried anyway.

I would love to love something, especially if I could do it without feeling like I was watching it die right in front of me

The woman behind the counter was wearing a tank top that had “Namaste!” written across the front of it like the Coca Cola logo. Her hair was red and wrapped in an orange scarf. Her nails were pink glitter and she had a pendant of Guadalupe hanging from her neck.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

Yes. I want to look like you. I want to be so thoroughly anchored into some sort of pop culture aesthetic that nothing can knock me over or wash me away or make me hate everyone. I want to sleep again.

She went into the walk-in and got a slice of cheese then had me scoop up the rat up with a dustpan and follow her outside.

We walked along a garden path toward the back fence. The sun was just hitting the green wet vines and red tomato skins. I passed a cluster of sunflowers. Behind them stretching along the fence was a row of dirt mounds with tiny homemade crosses sticking out of them.

“This is where we put them,” Jimmy said.

I looked down a row of dew-covered twig crosses drying the morning light.

“If the health department comes just pull the crosses out and say it’s squash.”

Ed tapped his coffee cup with a spoon like he was an inmate but Mirror didn’t look up. She has a pretty laissez-faire attitude toward customers in general. When I went to turn on the OPEN sign she told me not to because, “If you do that, they’ll just come in.” Flawless logic.

Ed pulled the cellophane off the Pall Mall pack, crinkled it into a ball and threw it on the ground where it blossomed into a clear plastic flower.

“I like to think of myself as a coworker with lots of experience rather than a boss,” Franklin said.

Credence, whose hope never falters, didn’t find her obvious gayness to be a stumbling block. She did come to the rally and they hung out. He convinced her that she was committing some form of gender oppression by shutting him down just because he was a dude. That lasted about a minute. I’m pretty sure, from what I know of her, that today she looks on her two months of recalcitrant bisexuality like some sort of Mandan piercing rite; a final trial before being declared gay for life. They stayed friends though and she’s been a cook at Rise Up Singing since it opened.