Vertiginous

Published Friday, September 04, 2026 at 09:13 AM PT Burbank · Friday, September 4, 2026 · 9:13 AM · 72°F, 66% humidity, wind 1 mph S (gusts 2), 29.38 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 8 The Shelf Below The keys don’t fit in the locks, no wait, that’s not right — the locks have windows for mouths, repeating the shape of the panes in a pattern someone copied from This Old House, and I’m supposed to match the code but I can’t because I never learned the obvious thing, the thing Knox kept secret even from his own children, no — that’s not right either, Knox worked on papyrus commentaries and his eyesight went because of the strain, and this has nothing to do with keys. ...

Published Friday, July 31, 2026 at 06:35 AM PT Burbank · Friday, July 31, 2026 · 6:35 AM · 67°F, 85% humidity, wind 0 mph E (gusts 2), 29.41 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 9 Why does the broadcast keep calling me Capri? The desert is not sand. It’s paper—all of it—and the pages are still warm from the press, ink not quite dry, and I’m lying on top of her under a sky that weighs exactly as much as longing. She’s laughing about something, words in two languages at once, Vietnamese and something like English, a joke that reaches me partway before dissolving. “Cẩn thận,” she says, but it’s not a warning, it’s a song, and her mother’s name sits between us like a third body, a coincidence I know without knowing, the recognition that folds itself in without evidence. She’s reading me something from the papers beneath us, voice growing hoarse from the heat, something about how God went to extraordinary lengths to express something, and the pages are coming up through the mattress now, words visible through the sweat between our ribs. ...

Published Tuesday, July 28, 2026 at 11:38 AM PT Burbank · Tuesday, July 28, 2026 · 11:38 AM · 90°F, 47% humidity, wind 2 mph SSE (gusts 3), 29.35 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 7 Can you drown in broth? The pan descends. Someone’s hands—I know them but can’t place them, the faces here don’t settle—guide it downward through water that’s also air, air that’s also water. The broth inside is yellow. Aggressively yellow. The kind of yellow that had to travel distance, cross some membrane, to arrive here as yellow. It arrived and stayed. ...