date to be determined

i once had a boyfriend who slept with a hammer under his pillow. there were also a pair of surgical tongs he kept on the top of the toilet tank. i don't know what the tongs were for, but you weren't allowed to move them, or else. the hammer was kept under the pillow, so that it was handy for looting at the first alert of riots caused by obama's assassination.

when i was in seventh grade, police raided the house across the street from the middle school. neighbors had been complaining about "the smell". it was coming from the garage where a deep freezer had broken and was thawing. its contents were rotting. although, they had been before the woman living there had collected them. the freezer was completely filled with the bodies of road-killed cats. she was collecting them for a date-to-be-determined mass burial.

riding passenger on the way to school one morning with my mom, there was a radio story about a domestic violence incident at a local apartment complex where a man had broken up with his girlfriend. she insisted on a goodbye kiss, which turned into a goodbye french with some fondling, at which point she bit off his tongue. she chewed and swallowed it to make sure it couldn't be re-attached later. my mom insists that i'm making the story up, that the radio never broadcast it.

my only porpoise in life

i am going back to school in august to get a teaching degree. i'm going to be an english teacher, mostly because i need a job with health benefits. and i like the idea of not working for two months but still getting paid for them. i am taking a psychology class. i cited my reason for taking the class as "so i can more effectively manipulate my students into productivity".

matty hilger fell in love with me one day at sol azteca. i miss sol azteca. somebody caught the kitchen on fire. he complained that he had holes in his pants. and i said that of course he had holes in his pants, how else do you get them on? and then i showed him my porpoise. i have a little plastic porpoise i carried in my purse. now it lives on my bookshelf. i found it on my twenty-second birthday, which was my golden birthday, while i was waiting on the limestone steps of the library. we were meeting for professional practice. porpoises are the ugly fish-version of dolphins. i showed it to matty hilger at sol azteca. it's my only porpoise in life.

my dearest casey hannan,

ti have another story for you about oppossums. my dad has a twin brother who owns a farm, kindof. they used to have cows and chickens. they don't anymore. but they do have oppossums. oppossums who eat the cat food on their deck. my uncle has a shotgun for such occasions. oppossum occasions. at dinner recently, he told a story about one of these occasions. he described as a "shotgun emergency c-section". we were eating pizza.

we had a mama duck living in one of our azalea bushes. they're white azaleas. i disagree with my mom on the decision of white azaleas. the duck has a nest. every afternoon when he got home from work, my dad fed her bread. before he got home from work, he would e-mail my mom at lunch to ask about the duck. she had seven eggs in her nest. six of them hatched. my dad says he wishes he would've spray-painted the mama duck before the eggs hatched. that way we'd know which duck was ours.

both of my parents are partially deaf. i think they are more deaf than they are less deaf. since neither of them can hear things, they're dependent on me to isolate the location of noises. last weekend this meant that we played a game. my mom drove the car back and forth in front of the house, stomping on the brakes irratically, while my dad and i manically followed it. i'm calling the game "find the squeak".
it's not a real game.