So this last one is my absolute latest publication.
It came out in the Paris Review this month, so.
Yeah, it's pretty swanky.
It's pretty swanky.
And it's kind of weird.
I do steal a lot from life, from the lives
of the people around me.
And also, Manuel knows that I tell everybody everything,
so that also applies to fiction.
So it's always interesting for family
to read the things that I write, because they recognize things.
And they don't enjoy the stories.
They're just sort of--
I don't know.
I have to write about that.
That feeling they get.
But this one is called "Fam," and there
is this collective narrator.
So I don't think there's any signals that I need,
but I'll read it for you just as it is.
"My little sister, niece, granddaughter, baby cousin
doesn't know she's pretty, so she asks everybody one post
at a time.
Her mom showed up at her high school graduation.
No one had seen her in eight years.
Mothers like that never know how to dress.
Too much fake jewelry, fake hair,
and a big-ass fake leather purse, still too small
for all her shame and addictions to everything else.
My little sister, niece, granddaughter, baby cousin
went to a costume party dressed as Selena or Madonna or Paula
Abdul.
Just a thin layer of 1985 draped over her tits.
She works out a lot.
A pic for the shoulder press, 78 likes.
A pic for the deadlifts, 134 likes.
Don't get me started on the squats.
She doesn't like photos when she isn't ready.
When her face is the one we see in the morning,
when she can't find her keys, or when
her phone is silent and black and asleep and dead,
and she has to wait fidgeting in that space
so close to oblivion.
They put titanium rods in her back
when she was 11 to correct the scoliosis.
She used to walk around like a Black Quasimodo,
loved and gorgeous.
The metal worked to undo the snake spine.
Only a little pain and constipation from the meds
to whip her back straight.
Afterward, there came new clothes, new friends,
new hobbies, one after another on a conveyor
belt, along with the chance to document it all.
Her happiness was electric, blinking.
A ding, ding, ding, ding.
Disappointment is oily.
It has hair and musk and cracked lipstick.
Her mother never spoke at the graduation.
Just faded into the crowd per the court order.
They say scoliosis is common in obese girls.
The weight on their birdlike skeletons is too much.
My little sister, niece, granddaughter, baby cousin
was popular.
117 hearts for feeding ice cream to a puppy.
64 LOLs for flipping off the president.
216 likes for a poolside bikini pose at sunset.
There are never enough.
Of course, the monsters came.
The trolls with their emoji fangs
shooting projectile venom of envy and disgust.
We were afraid she would choke to death
on the poison like the white girls on TV,
hanging from closet doors, bleed out into tubs.
But my little sister, niece, granddaughter,
baby cousin never even said a 'fuck you.'
Just kept on.
When her mother punches you in the chest for reasons too small
to see, the rest of the world has
a hard time hurting you more.
So she smiles into her phone, where the smiles are brightest.
Into the light, the wires, the electricity of us
who have become everything to her.
Because in the machine, there is no blood, no bone, and no fat."