Prose
grammar remains in tact, but the emotions don't. poetry-prose and creative college essays where my focus is on story-telling.
snippet from what has disappeared
March 2025
There aren’t many red benches in the city. Or in downtown suburbia—where the sky’s gray matches the building lines. I imagine it’s one of those things that’s hard to find, but easy to spot, as you wait for me there. Ice cream drips down your sleeve and I am waiting for something to happen. For the world to explode and the glass to swarm the air. For the clouds to overtake us, billowing after the Teslas and gold storefronts. You tell me something about the last moment we had like this — in the heart of July in dusty Valencia, where the least human things were the locks lining that bridge above the highway. I remember thinking that this here was its opposite — the heart of December in honeyed downtown where I watch droplets hanging in air, we are what’s most human now. I remember telling you I think this is a tale of cycles, where somehow months later, I am back at the same heartache, on that red bench in suburbia. I hesitated to call this a wavelength though, because we are not reaching the same peaks every time. We are not pushing and pulling with the moon’s tides that remain, relenting, every beach we are near; there’s something here in the shape of boomboxes and clay strokes, each resonating in a new shape. A different piece of our hearts have been suckled out, as I’m reminded of blind mothers cradling their baby’s leg, feeling each dip and form of bone. I wonder if that has been what’s happened here — we are engraved with words we must feel with each nerve to know its meaning. Mine has said that my heart is always in one timeline as you: this is a story about remembering before things have happened, and crying after we tumbled in the dunes. You told me then that somehow we have all been chosen for this, to have our mind exploded into states of supernova. I clutched the bench again in maroon, it wrinkling under my grip as I imagine this is how the skin folds as well. How our hands gripped each other, and ran over mirage veins that summer before. How I still can’t tell you, that sometimes I wonder if they chose wrong. Instead, I say, Even now, we all live there — that pottery wheel to our urn. I passed by that bench again today, a week after nothing happened. There were four ladies sitting on it, each holding an ice cream cone, with one licking the stripe down her arm. I’m remembering now that as skins of paint wrinkle, sooted paint flakes beneath. It’s the way my fingerprints were captured in bleed like dry tears in the shape of your pores crackling, falling. Like how your face must have scrunched and folded when you realized what was being lost. How we had never called this place home before, because we thought home was grander, larger, more permanent than this. But how was I supposed to know that I’d only recognize my daydream when it turned into nostalgia. And how was I supposed to tell you then —our voices suspended between an ache-like fog— even now, we still live there. ***
A speculative flash fiction about cake and realness
February 28, 2023
“And this better be fixed next time!” The door slammed causing the bells on the handle clang against each other, as if sending out war cries to the entire bakery. Jesse sighed, wiping his forehead with his brittle cloth hat. “Carry on everyone!” He shouted to the stirring crowd and sulked back towards The Kitchen. The Kitchen, defined as the whir of ten mixers going at once, the chimes of oven timers, shuffling of a thousand legs scuttling around. Except to Jesse it was silence, because under that noise, nobody said a word. Nobody made a face. Nobody uttered anything about Jesse telling the customer that his fork was made of cake. It started with a cakeboard. In the times he wasn’t busy, Jesse would be admiring the pristine, piped cakes adorned with syruped strawberries and water-colored kiwis. How he wished he could create works like that. A customer snapped her fingers at him before he sighed into the glass, a foggy cloud left behind. Picking it up, the cakeboard was too soft — Jesse immediately knew — it would smush into cake-pops. But he found no cakeboards left. Just cake. The rest of the day followed suit. Half of the pastry bags were mere illusions. A cupcake wrapper was the thinnest layer of cake possible. Jesse even swore he saw a pug-faced child sneak a lick at his chair and come up with a grin obnoxiously stained with hot-pink frosting. He sniffed every appliance, searching for that cloying vanilla so recognizable to him. The new game: Is it real or is it cake? “Excuse me! I asked for a chocolate cake, not this,” scowled the lady on the other side. Jesse glanced down restlessly. What if that’s cake too? Wait, it is cake, what am I saying? “Ma’am, I don’t see the problem here.” “Gosh, don’t you see it’s double chocolate?” “Ma’am I’m pretty sure they’re the same, one just has a bit more- ” “No they aren’t! One’s chocolate cake, one’s double chocolate. They. Aren’t. The Same. Just that tiny bit can kill a man you know?” Jesse pinched his nose bridge. A small part of him wished this lady was also cake so he wouldn’t have to deal with her. “Hello? Are you going to fix it?” Ok, maybe a big part. He took a deep breath and swiveled around. Those words kept looping in his mind: They aren’t the same. They aren’t the same. They aren’t the same. Except they are; cake is just the same ingredients jumbled around in different amounts. Jesse’s trudges turned to a halt — maybe the floor is cake too — and looked down at the crescent-shaped blood on his arm. He’d clenched too tight. Underneath his fingernails, instead of skin and blood were bits of cake. Maybe humans are just cake too. The same thing jumbled around until different flavors emerged. Jesse licked away the crumbs before grinning as though his face was covered in obnoxious magenta frosting. Although she’s right. Just a tiny bit of bad can kill a man.***