“So I told my boss to piss off,” I said.

My wife’s normally serene face turned to stormy red. Was it the unusually colorful language I used in front of our three children?

Do you remember that summer we decided to eat only bread? Or I decided bread, and you broccoli.

Amy looked around. Everything was pink. Pink walls, pink bedspread, pink pillows, pink TV. Pepto-Bismol pink, Freudian pink; as if the Disney princess had died. Banksy would love this. She turned on the TV; every show was in pink. The Bachelor was in pink. Jamie Oliver was in pink. Even Shark Tank was in pink. Reality was the new pink. Or pink was the new reality.

Along the horizon, south of the United States, an expanse of crenellated concrete rises out of the Pacific and vanishes into the east, making tangible the intangible: an imaginary line bisecting a land once one. Tall and proud The Wall stands. Forty feet high and twenty feet deep. Its surface unadorned with design or texture. Just flat and grey through and through. Mighty enough to thwart the charge of fifty thousand Spartans. Priam of Troy would have envied it, the great lodestar of American Jingoism.

From birth until the sixth grade, home was a room on the tenth floor of the Hotel El Dorado in downtown Los Angeles. During its heyday in the 1910s and the 1920s, the hotel stood at the foot of the Spring Street Financial District—the Wall Street of the West—amidst the Braly Building (at twelve stories tall, the city’s first skyscraper), the Hotel Alexandria (frequented by the stars of the Golden Age of cinema, Humphrey Bogart and Greta Garbo), and, just blocks away, City Hall, all regal and white, looming over the blooming metropolis. The El Dorado flourished with all in its proximity and even lay claim to its own celebrity resident in Charlie Chaplin, but by the 1960s the financial institutions fled west to Wilshire and Figueroa, and the burgeoning quarter was rendered hollow. Its splendor laid to waste.  

i am normally not the kind of dog who whistles at women on the street or stalks them with my eyes. i figure ladies have enough to worry about without some creeper giving them a hard time

Blush, I think, is the most important component when making up a corpse. I could not effectively do my job without it, I think as I apply the tiniest amount to the face of an eighty-year-old man who died of a heart attack. He must have been a drinker. I’ve been given a picture of him from when he was alive and he had ruddy cheeks.