Shirley Magazine

Every night before bed, Ma runs Samsara through a battery of Thai tongue twisters. Samsara stumbles through the squawking maze of “Who sells chicken eggs?” Ma wrings a nipple for every inverted word, every warbling tone, but Samsara sings like Mariah Carey through “the big monster chases the little monster,” and for that Ma kisses the sting from Samsara’s chest. “Remember,” Ma says, walking her fingers slow down Samsara’s belly. “Yak yai always gets yak lek.” The big monster always gets the little monster.

Beach Festival said the newspaper ad. My sister ran her finger over the list of acts and prodded my upper arm. “We simply have to go,” she said. I agreed, rubbing the sore spot where she’d jabbed me. Summer arrived like a pan of water boiled dry, leaving only a scorch mark. The sun made us startled and prickling for a fight, but too tired and woozy from sweating out our final electrolytes to act on it. A horrid combination. Limp yet bristling, and ineffectual either way.

When Ingrid learned she was a vampire slayer, there was comfort in learning Big Todd, her manager at the Reel to Reel video store, was her watcher—her mentor, her guide. Amidst her new awareness that vampires were real and out to get her, there was a comfort in anything at all familiar. She staked her first vampire behind the McDonald’s on Garrett Street—the McDonald’s known for homeless folks eating out of its dumpster at night, and she could have sworn she’d heard them cheering her as she grappled this toothy monster to the ground, and stabbed his heart. But when it was over, they seemed content to mind their business, three men divvying up a Big Mac that was still almost entirely intact, a woman dipping what was left of a Filet o’ Fish in the final dregs of a two ounce tub of sweet n sour sauce.

The marriage between Dylan and Susan Spade had been wasting away for months, but Dylan just knew the alligator would save it. It was on sale at half price. And it was cute, in its own way. It chirped. That it was an eccentric solution to a complex, serious problem was not lost on Dylan, but he found the idiosyncratic nature of his remedy a potent source of its power. It may be just the thing that makes it succeed against all odds, he figured, as he watched it wriggle atop its brothers and sisters, there in the big glass display at Pet City. It happened in Reader’s Digest all the time.