dreamszilla

A prima ballerina is gradually usurped by a youth with preternatural ability. Image generated with OpenAI "Ballet, like opera, is wonderful because it is monstrous, the hyper development of skills nobody needs, a twisting of human bodies and souls into impossible positions, the purchase of light with blood." - Irina Dumitrescu, Swan, Late: The Unexpected Joys of Adult Beginner Ballet . The lights bowed in a soft indigo upon the stage. The house seats waited, empty, in the gloom, but as she took those pointed, shuffling steps, Alice still felt it - the heavy, crushing presence of expectation. There was no music. Alice knew the steps by heart. She had taken on the name of Giselle many times. In fact, it was her favorite role to play. Like most girls, she had dreamed of being draped in veils of white, but when Alice put on the dress, she commanded eyes forward, not back. She dodged through the shadows on the stage. Twirling, jumping, twisting. Passé, Jeté, Saut...

When an ex-convict gets in trouble for stealing fruits, he will do anything to avoid going to back to jail. Image generated with OpenAI I was a wanted man. A miscreant, an outlaw. They wanted to find me and take me away. Lock me up for a long time probably. All because I stole some fruit from a grocery store. Sure, I stole from that store almost every day - bananas, apples, plums - stuffed them in my bag while I bought a roll of toilet paper or some other bullshit. Guess somebody was watching me on camera or something, and one day a cop was there, hiding in the shadows, waiting. Well, I ran as soon as he sprung out at me - ran and ran, ran across the bridge, had to get away. Don't want to go back to that iron cage no more. Besides, I was just trying to feed my family - what's a man supposed to do? We just wanted to scare him, actually. That was the plan we agreed upon. We've seen this guy stealing fruit at the store day after day - who does that? And he seem...

In Fresno, 1978, Julie faces sexism when she applies to be an Emergency Medical Technician. Image generated with OpenAI "Like wildflowers you must allow yourself to grow in all the places that nobody thought you would." - Author unknown In December of 1978, an unexpected late afternoon downpour left the streets glassy, the sky dark and the air dewy. I had one final stop - the Star Ambulance Company, where I hoped to get a job. The company was housed in two reddish-brown, single-story family homes, with a partially bare lawn and a concrete path connecting the two. A hefty brown dog sat sphinxlike smack in the middle of the lawn area. On the same block were more single-family homes, some manicured and others years into disrepair. Typical for a block in Fresno. The site was only a mile from the city's urban center but the whole neighborhood had already crawled in for the night. As I got out of the car, the big brown canine arose. When I came close to the am...

Avi reflects on how his childhood was shaped by his mother and her sickness. Image generated with OpenAI I am the sole fruiting of the brief and often antagonistic union of Matthew Kleinman and Sarah Levy. Theirs was a marriage that started out as an obsessive need, but soon drifted towards doubt, then declined into disappointment, before finally settling on searing regret. By the time I was out of diapers, both parties of this marriage had already fallen down the staircase of expectations and were laying prone at the bottom, casting accusing glances at the other and grimly rubbing their bruised limbs. I have very few memories of our time together as a family and certainly no happy ones. My strongest memory is of my parents arguing in the kitchen while I busied myself with some toys on the floor nearby, half listening to their angry words, half engaged in repeatedly crashing two toy trucks together. At some point, my father spun around in anger and frustration and put his...