We were early birds, bad girls, schemers, druggies. Aria and I only attended high school as freshmen; after that, we were independent study kids. While Analy High’s class of ’96 amassed memories to chronicle in yearbooks, we skulked around our small California town, smoking weed and later meth, hitchhiking, getting fucked up with grown men.…
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I’m over the moon! My essay “Snakebit,” originally published in The Threepenny Review, has been chosen for The Best American Essays 2017, edited by one of my literary heroes, Leslie Jamison. “Chasing Arrows,” published in New England Review, also received an honorable mention. This is proof positive that a new writer can still gain entrance to…
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He came from Florida, though I forgot which part as soon as he said it. Definitely not Miami. His skin was a fierce pink and he wore a turquoise Marlins baseball cap on backwards, a loose-fitting tank top, and board shorts. Pudgy, thirty-something, and reeking of booze. Something about the guy I liked. He had…
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Then I heard him. Don’t believe I was ever happy fiddling with dolls. Or skipping around the yard, tra-la. Adults invented the myth of the carefree childhood. As an only kid, I remember realizing—I must have been five or six—that no one would ever see who I truly was inside. Heartbreaking. Also, I remember hungering.…
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We meet a fat diamondback five minutes down the trail. He is stretched across the path, dozing in the shade of a juniper bush. I’m an adult, so I want to act like one, but I’m crying so hard I can’t inhale and snot is dribbling into my mouth. It takes me twenty minutes to…
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Alia Volz 