Geraldine Salinas stood perfectly still in the hallway. The bell was going to ring in a minute or two. Gerry held her notebook in one hand and the book she was reading for class, Peace and Boats, in the other. “What’s it about?” some overfamiliar stranger would ask her. “Peace,” Gerry would invariably reply. “And boats.”
You get off the bus and it’s still sorta cold out but not quite cold enough to snow, so you’re drenched in freezing rain. Let me tell you something: there is nothing worse than freezing rain. It reaches to your core and freezes that and then your body takes the rest of your nerves along for the ride. It makes you feel barren. Not even a living human being. You are a husk of ice.
Your history teacher was talking about the Holocaust when Jews and Socialists and Homosexuals were killed and she said that trauma is indescribable with regular words. The only way to know is to feel it yourself. So you know you’re cold, but you can never really tell somebody what it’s like.
Jeremy tossed his phone in my face and I had to practically do a fucking acrobat trick to catch it as he told me to read his last received text:
“u r an asshole”
Wow. Such beautiful prose. I laughed a little, mostly out of politeness, and asked why Lisa would even say that. Jeremy looked at me like I was a little kid or something.
So I wake up one day and I’m pissing the bed and honestly it’s freaking me out because, you know, I’m a grown man. I have control of these things. I dart off to the bathroom and after I’m over the toilet and all I’m fine, you know?
But I’m not because it doesn’t stop. I’m just standing there, peeing. I try to stop the flow, you know, hold it in, pinch it off, and I can last maybe half a second before boom here it goes again. So I switch to sitting down and by now I know something must be wrong because I’ve been peeing for at least five minutes here and I’m not feeling any sort of relief.
Robin Garcia 