Gaz hadn’t told Claire about the dress yet. Better to wait until they were all at the hotel, when there was nothing she could do about it. No sense searching every bridal store in the state, only to come back with the exact same outcome—no dress. Her mother suggested she use the beaded scarf—that much she had—and match the eggplant…
[This piece contains violent content.] for EL On the morning Lora M. Berty broadcast Doug McKillan’s violent diatribe on the Uplifting Words for the Day program, the people of Merryville left their homes, impromptu, to congregate at the town square. In a mass, they stood before the 45-x-25-foot-tall screen, large enough to show a drive-in movie if the mass media…
It’s 10 p.m. on a drizzly Friday night in Los Angeles. The temperature is in the fifties. My wife, Beverly, and I are home, relaxing on our double lounge chair with a red Scottish blanket draped over us. Cuddled next to us is Ben, the Lhasa Apso we rescued nine years ago. Outside, the backyard lights illuminate the palm trees…
at school from 1st grade through grad school / through four different languages the teachers / didn’t tell me about the weight of time / embedded in your body like hauntings / in this house made of bones and skin // a year lost walking on my complexion / and first footsteps at venice beach / as demarcation of…
photo credit: The Yamamoto Family Chris Yamamoto is an aspiring screenwriter raised in Pearl City, Hawaii. He is pursuing a degree in screenwriting from Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts and will graduate in the spring of 2023. He was also the grand prize winner of the 2021 UCLA Terasaki Nibei Video/Script Contest for a short script…
Once upon a time, I dreamt of sirens bruising the morning sky over coffee. There was no relief in the shadows of the buildings, sticky hot fingers reaching across the sea, crawling out of the waves to cast themselves heavy over the fishermen, the beach while I poured a second cup from the pan. The kitchen smelled of breakfast and…
In her hundred years of teaching fanged girls, Mina has seen the rules for turning change twice. When she was a teenager, girls only turned if a vampire bit them. They were mostly safe if they stayed home after dark and didn’t fraternize with men. The rules changed in the 1930s, when unmarried women turned overnight on their thirtieth birthday.…
The Journey There is but one road here in this desert, where mountains rise in the distance only to disappear. At night, when you stop for sleep, the stars fall all around you. What you have left behind, you cannot remember. What you are going toward, you may never reach, like the mountains or that star. But what does…
When I am overwhelmed with adult life, I think of childhood days home from school with a cold, cozy in bed. My mother moves the living room TV into my room, and I spend hours watching syndicated episodes of I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched and reading Sweet Valley High. My mother brings me snacks, presses her palm to…
We didn’t want to go to the mystery dinner theater, but we kind of always wanted to, and so none of us knew which of the others would be the one to offer it as an option. It was Asa, Jude, myself, and our friend Raoul, who was a total hipster. Paint the town; that’s what we had in…