frosted glass.
prompt:  no prompt. just write. I don’t like the frosted glass. The whole world obscured by a cartoon coffee cup and a bean. A man climbs out of his Nissan and all i see is shoulders one hip, 1 shoe. The coffee bean looks like a brain, right brain, left brain: Everything comes in opposing hemispheres. She’d say this out loud, but no one would hear, and if they did, they’d scoot away. So many things–how many?–does she not say every day. Pages of conversation flip accordion style every second. It makes sense to me, she’d say, but everything outside of her own cognition melts the context and loses

drive.
prompt: Drive Another elevator ride would kill her dead in the lobby. If I died today, she had thought, I would be most upset about wearing these dress pants on the last day of my life. God, take me out in my red sneaks, for Christ’s sake. So she held pretend conversations in a tin, wheeled rocket with airbags, 7o miles an hour down the interstate. Hello to the cows. Hello to the pretty man in the Honda Accord. I love you (so much easier in flight. Can barely make out the syllables when her feet are still, becoming solids, wet socks in concrete, wearing parking lots for shoes.).

a letter to Time.
prompt: An open letter to Time. (totally self-serving today) Today, you suck. I hate your guts. You have no concept of yourself, sprinting when I tell you to walk; creeping when I tell you to zoom. If you have lights, I’ll punch them clean out. I barely understand the structure of you, how you shoot straight and then bend at will, like you are a rubber arrow or a looping coaster, whichever pleases your latest whim. You are then and now and once and heretofore, and you are belching up your power with your hand in your pants. I will not wear you on my wrist–ultimate denial. “You’re not the boss of me.” (I hate i

umbrella.
Prompt: Umbrella She held a dog-checked umbrella, blue and white, and stared at the man who stared at the sky. It was okay that the bus had not come so she could stand, blend into the 3D street scene, another slosh of paint against a steel-colored canvas. Observe and report. Observe and report, her mantra. Should have warn taller socks, thicker. The puddle at the corner had splashed and left the denim at her achilles heel soaked and cold. Should have leapt, she thought. I never leap. The man who stared at the sky stared at her, and she wondered if he saw, or didn’t see. He leapt too far, maybe. The only reason, she could see, for the

a glass of water.
PROMPT: a glass of water. “There’s a hair in my water,” she told the waitor. He nodded. She saw the flex of his jaw and felt his grimace (masked. He tried. But she could feel it. You can’t mask the lead weight of aversion.) She drummed her fingers on the table, and they sounded like hooves. How much longer would she wait? This was ridiculous. “This is ridiculous,” she whispered to the vase. The long green stem divided the room in half. Men in brown and navy, three black suits sat in varied poses around a large rectangle table. Only two laughed, and she could