16-17. / Sneak Peek 4

I didn’t ask any follow up questions. I understood. I felt like it could have been any one of us, at any time. We were all one misogynistic comment or unsolicited touch away from total panic. --- Clea Bierman is a fashion and lifestyle journalist with bylines in international editions of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and more. As a reporter, she broke headlines for the celebrity weeklies, including In Touch and Life & Style. Her creative nonfiction work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review and Pithead Chapel. Clea holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hunter College and resides in Los Angeles where she manages Loop Magazine and writes a blog called Doses.

I hadn’t yet met Sascha. I was in Rabat with another girl and we were lost in the markets. A man helped and we followed him to a house full of art and dried fish.

Cal once punched too hard mid-play, so dad said I should nail him one back.   It was 4th of July in Virginia Beach. One sand scoop later I stung, grains strewn   like pyrotechnics, my brother’s cheek bleached by the crisp, beige stain. We were human.

the world’s lunch spilled. on soaked streets with sewer steam rising popping corn on a gas stove. i was listening. i was always listening. following ounces until blues blurred. until my body caught in cracks of RTA track. somewhere between doing laundry and shopping for groceries grandma said we were poor.

If I drink ten White Russians cause the cream makes an okay dinner on a hot night the weekend after the 4th when we’ve got two bachelor parties and a swinger’s meet-up in the club, I’ll tell you I’m Russian—but leave out the Jewish part.

In Suzhou, China, in a small massage parlor, in a head-shaped hole in a stuffed vinyl table, parallel to a bamboo floor, a little tourist’s face became red and hot.

Darks rings carve a Fire Island log.   Light footsteps patch the trails of mud.   Each oldest tree a woods’ heirloom, like a gold ring or trauma passed down.

In the film Life as a House, Kevin Cline sits in a hospital bed recovering from a cancer that hasn’t revealed itself yet. No one is at his bedside. He’s divorced and his only child, a teenage Hayden Christenson, wants nothing to do with him.