Vero and Jesse

https://chariotpressjournal.com/2022/04/vero-and-jesse/ Vero slid down a hole after her mother died. Life in the hole was dusky and out of focus, so she wandered around her childhood home, ambling from room to room as though she’d misplaced something, a water glass maybe, or a set of keys. But she hadn’t lost anything she could recover; she...

Redneck Daiquiri

https://forumccsf.org/2021/05/26/redneck-daiquiri-by-christopher-williams/ On summer days you could find Stella Antoinetti panhandling in front of 7-11 for beer and smokes. She wore a dozen or so jangly bracelets on each forearm and sang to herself to pass the time. Sometimes, if the song was coming out just right and she was coming up on her favorite part,...

The Church of Buenos Aires

Jeremiah lied every night. After prayer circle the youth group would discuss what concrete steps they’d taken to establishing their church here, in Buenos Aires. And every night Jeremiah, who would’ve spent most of the day walking aimlessly around the metropolis, lied. He said that he’d witnessed to a drunk in Bosques de Palermo, or...

The Word for Happy

High school is forced correspondence. Most of what we write is busy work, serving only to advance us to the next chapter, unit, grade, and eventually, to the next station in life. But there are exceptions. My twelfth grade math teacher wrote me poetry. He was from the city, so he wrote breathlessly about the...

The Schierholtz Deal

        March 1, 2018         It would depend on how we drew up the terms, but I’d be open to that. Jan, do you still have that friend in M&A over there? (...) Perfect, go ahead and reach out to him. And tell you what, I’m going to let...

Maria Mora

Maria Mora. I’d say that name to myself countless times throughout the day. While leaning my head against the bus window, peeling an orange over the kitchen trash can, lifting the blinds in the morning, lying awake at night. Maria Mora.         She became a filter through which my experiences emerged lighter,...

Check-out Day

Part 1 - Part 1 is the only part. In it I awake to find the fog on the grounds residing heavily within my skull. I feel euphoric. No, I am euphoric. I get to leave today. They told me I get to and so I get to. Life is simple, easy. Everything I say...

Drunk off the Moon

Sometimes when I wait in lines I think about drinking. And about this friend I had who disappeared to Vegas. Once we rode bikes on a country road in the middle of the night. We had a bottle of whiskey and we laughed while passing it back and forth, edging our rusty mountain bikes a...

What An Always-Wet Boot Means

There's a reason I always tell you war stories when you can't sleep. I want you to know what a wet boot on all the time means. It means you can't be comfortable, even when lying. Even when lying like you are. Remember that. Some men, even when lying like you are, can never be...