Fred is cooking absinthe in the kitchen. He's a handsome, macabre gourmet in black jeans and tats; a tall and gaunt mad scientist with eyes as shiny as opals. He's been working on it since yesterday when Desma arrived, Guatemalan bag in hand, ready to camp out for the weekend on the floor of Fred and Erin's seedy studio apartment. The absinthe will be done in time for Ruth's birthday party later. The counter is lined with mason jars full of herbs and spices. Fred holds up a jar containing a twisted, beige root. "This will kill you if you put too much in," he says.             from Absinthe That morning Malena woke up in incredible pain. She was familiar with it and in the past three years since her diagnosis, had formed an interesting relationship with it. Instead of masking it or running away from it, she became rather intimate with it. It was a powerful ally that needed consistent attention. There was room in her life for nothing else. Slipper had visions. Bad ones and good ones. They came out of nowhere and were tinged with an underbelly of woe. Even the good ones pointed at something underneath the surface, a small hint of blue. He would see a strange man in his bedroom only a few days before actually running into him on the streets. He would see the sick and the dying, their bodies outlined in x-ray monochromes while riding the bus. If he looked at someone for too long, he would see their heart, beating right through their skin, sitting tight in a transparent chest. Once in a while he would spot patches of gray on a person and he came to identify the grays with corruption. Spots of gray would pepper the liver, the lungs, the flesh, and the brain.             from The Painter of Hearts Cool if we got together. Stacey thinks it will be romantic. Everyone will be shocked. I will be the high school Lolita. She wants me to approach him and when I do she's thrilled. We are soon dating and I fall in love with him and the rumors start to circulate. Stacey is so pleased that she tells anyone she can sink her pearly pink polished talons into. She grills me incessantly on the details of our sexual encounters and relishes every piece of data. I wonder if she masturbates at night to thoughts of Dino's rough, stubble beard chaffing the insides of my thighs.             from Nowhere A terrible relationship has become a white trash cliché. A bruised body turns into the price you pay for wearing tight shorts at too young of an age. Or even better, the stranger the bond between husband and wife, the more it becomes a literate teenager's fantasy of passion and romance and Zelda and F. Scott and at the end of the movie you're left with a soiled hankie and a head full of hope for the mushy loner.             from Agnes

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