“Shot to the Lungs and No Breath Left”
from Pindeldyboz, July 2007

After Wade Dell Dallas put his fist in my eye on our third date, my father went after him with a .375 Holland and Holland Magnum.

Uncle Jack suggested that might be too much gun, seeing as the last thing it killed was a fourteen-hundred pound bull moose. Every year, my dad and his brothers and all their sons—some fifteen big, beefy, muscled Alaskan guys between the ages of six and sixty—loaded up two weeks worth of gear and disappeared into the Mountains, hunting moose. Or caribou. Or brown bear or doll sheep or goat, lynx and bobcat and elk, whatever had four legs to chase and a head to mount on the living room wall. I tried to imagine Wade's head up there next to the moose—his big 'ol ears sticking out, the taxi-dermed skin wind-whipped and ice-burned raw, his stupid blue eyes blank and glassy. “Wade don't weigh more than one-eighty,” Jack told my dad, who was squatted on the carpet loading up his field-pack. “That H&H'll spray his face straight backwards through his brain.”

Keep reading here:
www.pindeldyboz.com/mslungs.htm

“It Seems Our Time Has Run Out, Dr. Jones”
from Fresh Yarn, June 2007

It was the week before I was about to elope. I had a $20 dollar dress from H&M, my best friend was recently ordained at humanspiritualism.org, and there were three cases of Maker's Mark—we were good to go.

“Except for one thing,” Christopher said, “you have to tell him.” Christopher, FYI, was my finance, a fact that still sort of blows my mind. Usually guys like him are a) Taken, b) Gay, c) Dying, or d) A figment of my imagination. Christopher is none of these things. He's wonderful and smart and “together,”—like, there are goals and shit—and also he loves kids and puppies in a very non-sappy kind of edgy DIY sort of way. And he always, always does the right thing, even in those moments where the right thing makes you want to stick a fork in your eye which just then, was exactly what he was asking me to do.

Keep reading here:
www.freshyarn.com/47/essays/stielstra_itseems1.htm

“This Teacher Talks Too Damn Fast ”
from Toasted Cheese, June 2007

When I first started teaching, I thought it was going to go like Dead Poets Society: we'd rip up our textbooks and quote Whitman and play soccer to opera music, and if ever anyone was in trouble I'd know just how to save them.

Keep reading here:
www.toasted-cheese.com/ezine/7-2/stielstra.htm

“Letter to Mosquitoes”
from The 2nd Hand, winter 2006

I beg you, get out of my bedroom. I'm supremely allergic and I have big red welts all over my body, not just my arms and legs but also areas that I'd never imagine a mosquito could get to. They are not at all attractive and I get these looks on the street like what's THAT on your face? and don't even ask me about dating and some of the assumptions that've been made, it's certainly not very sexy to be itching in some of the places I've got to itch because of you. I've got pink goopy calamine stains on all my clothes including the Sevens I just bought at Neiman's which were really expensive -- FYI, I'll be paying that credit card bill off for a while 'cause you know I'm a waitress (in a breakfast place, no less) and it's not like I've got the cash flow to buy jeans like that every day, no sir, and now they have pink spots on the thighs and I'm pretty angry about that. To be quite honest, I 'm hanging on by a thread here so please, please go away. I've tried everything: citronella candles are burning as we speak and everything I own smells like Off -- my food is starting to taste like Off. Off sandwiches Off popcorn Off coffee -- and I've tried sleeping with the windows closed so you can't get in but it's August in Chicago and it's really hot and I can't afford an air conditioner so please, please go away.

I don't want to get nasty.

Keep reading here:
www.the2ndhand.com/archive/mosquito.html

“In Order to Remove the Boot”
from Otium, winter 2006

Penny got a collect call from the Illinois Department of Corrections and her imagination went a little crazy. What if it was Elliot, on a payphone, fresh inky fingertips, using his one phone call? Wishful thinking, she knew: Elliot was a law-abiding citizen. Elliot paid his taxes on time. Elliot looked forward to jury duty. Elliot, Elliot, Elliot. You know him, the guy behind the glass wall at the auto pound on Sacramento. He takes your VIN and your hundred-and-five dollars. He is stone-faced and cold, oblivious to sob stories or threats. “It’s illegal,” he recites, “to park or stand to obstruct a roadway less than eighteen inches of width on a two-way street or ten inches on a one-way street in accordance with the City of Chicago Department of Revenue.” Elliot deeply respected city departments and legal institutions in general, all except marriage, seeing as he’d left Penny—his soft, thick, pink-faced wife—without so much as a Dear John all alone in their big empty house on the boulevard, watching anxiously out the picture window.

Keep reading here: otium.uchicago.edu/articles/in_order_to_remove_the_boot.html