Star Rod

‘Wouldn’t you rather be masturbating?’ ‘Wouldn’t you rather be overwhelmed?’ And the answer is always, always yes, yes. I turn my headphones up till it hurts, act like a dick to a random woman just doing her job. Because it feels different than nothing. Which is all sobriety is. Nothing. Nothing in every direction.

Martyr by Kaveh Akbar

I catch myself putting out a plate for her at dinner, and then I do it anyway. I don’t think of her as being ‘dead’ anymore, so much as different. Still here, just … unseen.”

Patricia Wants to Cuddle by Samantha Allen

It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

To be female is to let someone else do your desiring for you, at your own expense. This means that femaleness, while it hurts only sometimes, is always bad for you. Its ultimate toll, at least in every case heretofore recorded, is death.

Females by Andrea Long Chu

The dark figure beckoned, beckoned in the rain, beckoned for him to come and walk, to come and play the game. And it was time to get started. There was still so far to walk. Eyes blind, supplicating hands held out before him as if for alms, Garraty walked toward the dark figure. And when the hand touched his shoulder again, he somehow found the