Susie
“You need to come home,” Mariah snapped, “right now! This goddamn dog wont let me get to Susie.”
I Only Have Eyes for You
“The only reason they found my next-door neighbor after he died was because of the smell,” Brittany said, her voice tinged with a hint of pleasure. Her cheerleader friends leaned in closer, eager for the lurid details of Gary Newcastle’s death on Winter Street. “He had hanged himself in the garage.”
October ‘98
I had done a decent amount of travel when I was younger, moving to another state and taking a few family trips across the country. For international travel, I had even spent a day in Nogales, Mexico that made me anxious to get back to Phoenix, and an evening in Ontario, Canada, that made me not want to go home at all. But it wasn’t until I went to Wallachia, Romania in October ’98 that I really travelled outside the country for more than a few hours.
Surveilled
On the sidewalk of the family housing area on the military base, two kids played catch in the cul-de-sac, their movements unnaturally synchronized, as though staged. A teenager threw a Frisbee to a robotic dog, which leapt into the air, twisting as it caught the toy’s plastic edge. Next door, a sprinkler sprayed the evenly cut grass, making rainbows in the air. Jack Wilburn admired the scene, the early afternoon so tranquil and balanced—almost eerily perfect.