Hollow Days

We didn't go around and get thankful at any Thanksgiving dinner this year. At one Thanksgiving dinner, we admitted our addictions. I didn't want to name my addiction (men), so I said baking. Two people said shopping. We all laughed. The good thing about shoppers is they give me stuff they don't want anymore. My hall closet is full of half-used scented candles.

There's this one friend who is maybe my sister. The only thing separating us as siblings is our different parents. We talked on my porch until 4 am last Sunday. I have a short list of hetero heroes. She's on the list twice. We drank the cheapest beer. We heard birds having sex or killing each other. We watched a cat draw blood from a stone some poor woman's hand. The last time we hung out on a porch, a sexy stick man did bike tricks in front of us. My sister-friend was amused. I was turned on enough by the stick man to show my teeth when I smiled. The stick man fell off his bike many times. 

I once fell forward on smooth concrete. I was carrying a pie. The pie landed hard. It hit like a car door against another car door. I got up, and Josh was afraid I wasn't OK, but it was the pie I was worried about. The pie was fine. I warned everyone that the pie had a rough life. But listen, you can't taste the fear in pie. If you want to eat a scared baked good, eat cake. Cake is always terrified it isn't as good as pie. It reminds me of that deathbed tradition where you ask a dying person if they want a final slice of cake or a final slice of pie, and they say, "Pie, pie, pie!" and the thought of more pie is so exciting it kills them right away. Cake is the slow death.

That is not a real tradition. When I left home, they told me to make new traditions.

I put up a tumblr. If you find me inscrutable (unlikely), go to the tumblr and easily figure me out.

The Password Is Money

I did a reading a couple weekends ago for a secret society. One of my former teachers introduced me. She punched up my bio to make it seem like I just got off a plane, and I was doing the secret society a favor. Someone came up after and wanted to know if I lie awake at night editing my book in my head now it's no longer in my hands. "Of course," I said. During the reading, I closed my eyes when I read one of the heavier sentences in a story. I don't think anyone noticed. I have very small eyes.

I'm working on a new book. I can say that. It's a novella. I have trouble writing longer stories. What I'm doing to get better is I turn off the Internet and sit in front of my computer and crochet a blanket until I think of something good to write down. Then I write for a while. Then I crochet. Then I write. It's working, so back off.

Enough is enough about writing. I sold a pie last week. I finished a pair of hand knit wool socks for a Civil War reenactor. I had a dream I was driving a car for the first time in eight months, and I drove off a pier into the ocean. The closest ocean is pick any direction and drive 1,000-plus miles. I'm waiting for that time in my adulthood where someone I know owns a beach house, and every summer Josh and I are invited there to put on our sunglasses and perv out on beach men.

Some friends came in for the weekend. One of them told the story of how her father calls bad drivers "turkeys." We all laughed. It was a good moment, so I didn't ruin it by saying my father does the same thing.

Night Bigot

The rain stopped, and I wanted to take a run. Everything outside felt solid and separate. It was like being in a shower room full of naked men, and every man was wet and slick in his own way. There were leaves on the sidewalk, but they were all from different trees. I was outside, and I felt solid, too, from a lot of eating.

Josh came with me. We were a block before a car got close alongside and a scream came out. It was a woman. The only word I understood was "faggots." She kept driving and screaming. We could still hear her a block away. It sounded like she'd coughed her voice against the ground and then picked up all the broken pieces and ate them quickly but separately. I'd heard a voice like that from a neighbor who couldn't wake up her son. She'd dragged him into the front yard and shook him. He was having a seizure. He'd never had one before. I have had a few.

One of my friends told me I don't look gay until I talk. Maybe the same is true online. I don't look gay until you read my stories. I have a new story in the first issue of Sundog Lit. It starts on one page and ends on another.

Kalliope

I have a pet snake. The only time I talk about her is at parties. Someone will tell a cat story, and then they'll look at Josh and me and say, "But you don't have any pets, right?" and Josh will say, "No pets," and he'll fake-frown. Then I'll remind him we have a snake. Josh will say, "I always forget about the snake."

I bought the snake from a pet store that was nice and clean. They had a tank of baby snakes. I said I wanted to buy one, and the clerk reached her hand in the tank and pulled out a bunch of baby snakes like they were gummy worms. She put them on the store counter and said, "Which one?" I picked one that was white and pink with red eyes. The clerk said, "She looks healthy." I agreed, though I had no idea. The clerk put the baby snake in a paper bag and stapled the top so she couldn't get out on the way home.

The snake bit me the first time I fed her. She was being picky, and I was being stupid. Her fangs went in like sewing needles. She chewed on the heel of my hand. I'd read what to do. I pushed her head forward with my thumb so her fangs slid out of my hand instead of breaking off inside. We have been respectful since. She's a young adult snake now. She eats every two weeks. If I don't feed her right away, I'll have dreams she's biting me. She stays in the spare room in an escape-proof tank built for venomous snakes. She's not a venomous snake.

Once upon a week in August, I guest-edited for SmokeLong Quarterly. The story I picked at the end of the week was called 'Boy Cylops.' It was written by Helen McClory. It's on the SmokeLong site now. READ IT.

You may remember Molly Laich as the writer sitting next to me at one of the off-site AWP readings. Someone came up to her and said, "You stole my seat." Molly got up and ripped that someone's teeth out. She put the loose and bloody teeth in the seat she'd just been warming. She said, "There you have it," and then she did a curtsy and left. I wasn't drunk, but I was drinking. I never saw Molly again in person at AWP, but we are Internet friends. We are both Tauruses, and we should probably only share the same physical space every once in a while. We share some video space at Story Tapes. WATCH IT.

Someone always makes a joke conflating my snake with my penis. No one who's seen my snake or my penis ever makes this joke.

Hot Now

My friend was in town from California. Her boyfriend came, too. It was the first time any of us had seen him in person. He has the eyes of a Siberian Husky. His arm hair is burned deeply into my mind in neat and obedient rows. Arm hair varies. Mine is good, but there's no order to it, and that's fine. I recently found out some men use straightener in their beards. I have vanity, but it's a lazy vanity. I probably won't try to straighten any hair on my body.

I was late to the bar. When I got there, someone told me I'd gotten hot, which is one of those compliments that's also an insult. A man with a blue drink stood behind my California friend and kept his eyes on her ass for a while. Someone said a silver fox was watching me, but I didn't believe it. I'm in denial about strangers finding me attractive. My California friend's boyfriend came back from the restroom and told us he was standing at the urinal and a drunk man came up and sniffed the air and said, "Asparagus, huh?"

There have been a lot of toads lately. I picked one up and it peed all over my hand in a sort of water balloon explosion. I used to have this dream of keeping a garden and making a toad house. A toad house is an overturned flower pot full of damp moss. I did keep a garden once, but I didn't make a toad house. It never occurred to me.

I wrote a book. You can pre-order it at Tiny Hardcore Press. One of my friends asked me what you do when you finish writing a book, and I said, "You start writing another book." I have a new project going, but that's all I can say.

There are people talking in my yard. Hush now. I'm going to make a peanut butter and apple pie.

Is There Anything

The joke on my family is God is trying to end our genetic line. Three of us grandchildren are out homosexuals. My cousin and I came out to each other at the same time on a family vacation. We said we had secrets we wanted to tell, and we dicked around all afternoon trying to tell them. We resorted to pen and paper. I told my cousin I was gay, and she told me she was a lesbian. I was sad because I'd wanted us to check out guys together. Sometimes men would come by the dock in fishing boats or on jet skis and try to flirt with my oldest cousin. She's straight. The men were sometimes attractive and often shirtless, and I would have to write it down somewhere how hot I thought they were. One summer, a man with hairy legs accused me of trying to look up his shorts. He was not wrong.

My brother came out years later. In the extended family, there are even more gay cousins. Out of the three of us gay grandchildren, there's an assumption we'll never have children of our own. Someone in my family was telling me about raising kids, and they said, "But you'll never have to worry about that mess." It's something I let slide because I've never wanted kids. I'm lucky if I get home once a year. One year, though, I might show up with a kid. You never know. Next year, I'll show up with the book I wrote. I'll let you know how that goes, especially after my family sees the back cover. It's a sexy back cover. I told you I appreciate a man's hairy leg, and on this back cover there is a man's hairy leg.

Josh and I went to a bookstore tonight. There was a couple on a date. Go into any bookstore and there's a couple on a date. The woman had an armful of cheap DVDs. The man was taking books off the shelf and telling the woman she should read them.

He said, "Read the first page of that," and he put a book on her stack of DVDs.

She said, "Open it for me. I literally have no hands."

I looked to see. She had hands.

The man told her about more books.

She said, "Why don't you write?"

He said, "Because I can read."

The woman went to sit down and sort through her stack. She fanned everything out like she was playing cards. I looked back at the shelf and found a book one of my teachers wrote. It was on sale for a dollar. A mother and daughter were looking at cookbooks an aisle or two over. The daughter got excited about a cookbook with just recipes for rice and potatoes. The mother wanted to know if there were any recipes in there for sweet potatoes.

The daughter said, "Not as many as you'd think."

She started making fart noises with her mouth.

The mother said, "You can just tell me if you want to go."

The daughter said, "I want to go."

But they didn't leave. It is hard for some people to leave a bookstore.

Sent

There's been a document open on my desktop for a year and a half, and now that document is closed. I turned in my first book tonight. I was told by one of my editors to sit there quietly a few minutes after I pressed SEND and absorb what I'd just done. When I was through absorbing, I got up and went to the kitchen and ate a handful of cashews. I looked at the floor. I store onions on a shelf in a mesh bag, and the onion skins still escape the bag and get on the floor. If we talk about my book, and you say, "What's next?" I'll tell you I'm going to figure out a better way to store my onions. And then I'll say I'm going to write a novel.

Josh and I take walks most nights. It's getting a little cooler, and the large crickets are coming out. They sound like lizards in the dead grass. There's one block on our walk where people smoke on their porches and fan their faces and stare at us like we just stumbled onto their farmland. That's my favorite block.

I have a story in the last issue of Dark Sky, but Dark Sky closed before they could put up their last issue, so you can find my story at Barrelhouse. It's like when you see your friend with her ex, and she's drinking with him, and she's kissing him, and she sees you looking, and she says, "Shut up, Casey Hannan. It's complicated." 

I shaved off all my facial hair the other day. I looked in the mirror and said, "I look younger." Josh said, "No, you look older." I looked in the mirror again and I saw it, but that's OK.