DISCLAIMER
Words and ideas all my own.
I do NOT consent to the use of my work and words to train or be fed into AI.
I do NOT consent to my work being copied or stolen.
I write because I love it, but I would be so sad if I saw any of my words, thoughts, ideas somewhere else being masqueraded under someone else's name. Don't break a poor boy's heart.
May 22nd, 2026 -- Ojai, CA
Entry IV
Fin was my friend at school but we won’t be in the same 5th grade classroom. After I transferred in January, we finished fourth grade together. I liked Fin because she looked tricky like how they describe fairies in stories. Her clothes were always ruffled like she’d stopped halfway trying to tear them off all at once even though she never had any stains on them. She has a voice that is bright like it’s made out of bubbles and she’s missing a front tooth like me but on the bottom side.
Fin got me in trouble a lot because she made me laugh, and her favorite time to whisper jokes in my ear was when we were supposed to be quiet and respectful. She would make my laugh ring out in the hushed awe of assemblies or math tests, and the loudness of me would bang around the room like when you drop a frying pan on the floor late at night.
Bev had lots of pillows around the trailer that said things like “Laugh Loud and Laugh Often” or “Joy Is Only Complete When Shared With Others” but she didn’t stick to them when the vice principal would call her and say I was being disruptive again. Fin told me that’s an example of hypocrisy, and I hadn’t ever heard a word that big come out of such a small mouth. But my Fin always chewed big words well.
Fin told me once while we were walking home that she was going to marry a girl some day. We had been walking in a straight line, only jumping out of our path to avoid the sprinklers on the lawns that would stretch past their green squares and shatter onto the pavement in a splat where our feet were meant to be. She said it like it wasn’t a secret and like it was the smallest deal in the world. She said it like it was inconsequential which means that it was so unimportant it doesn't even matter or have to be said. I nodded because I liked how she said it. I felt big and brave for acting normal about it. I told her I just wanted to marry someone who was nice to me. She smiled one of her smiles that always looks a little evil and said “Well, that means you’re gonna marry a girl too.”
May 21st, 2026 -- Ojai, CA
Entry III
On Easter, Bev makes white cake with coconut flake frosting. On Thanksgiving, she makes turkey but it’s really pretty dry. On the first night of Rosh Hashanah, she makes beef but she always tells the youngest of us it’s roast beast, and that she doesn’t buy it at the Winn-Dixie but that she traps The Thing in the glade and carves off a chunk of it to share with us at home. She says it cries and offers up whatever piece it can to prolong its life a little longer, as if Bev, who is the second oldest person I know, would be able to scare anything that thoroughly. Art says this story of hers is “distasteful”, but he’s always first after prayer to use the serving fork to grab a piece and stick it into his mouth to hide his smile. I think he has always really loved her like this, and I don't think it stopped even when Bev died. Art told me when she passed that his prayers had been answered. He said that he couldn’t have gone first, because it would have killed her. He said that he wanted to be the one who would be strong and pass out his remaining time on earth. He never looks strong when he tells me this. He usually just looks kinda stuck until he blinks twice, resettles in his recliner, and makes the same comment about the same episode of Walker, Texas Ranger.
May 19th, 2026 -- Ojai, CA
Entry II
Before Mama died, Dad worked in the dining commons kitchens for the University of Florida. He wore a hair net and an apron, but I never got to see him in them because he said they lived in the kitchens and that he couldn’t bring them home. He worked breakfast and lunch prep and service and sometimes he would stay to prep dinner.
Mama used to work at the student book store on campus. She said she would restock all the books the students just couldn’t get enough of. And I knew she would always be extra nice to all the students and professors when it was finals season. Sometimes she would pack extra snacks in her lunchbox to give to the ones who seemed extra tired and told me not to tell Dad. She liked the bookstore fine enough, but she stopped that when I went into third grade. Dad said she had gotten too sick and was too tired to work. So instead of driving together, Dad would kiss her and me on the forehead in our separate beds and then leave for work alone, the door going kir-click behind him. Mama would stay in bed until I went to get her. I made toast and poured juice by myself for me and her and felt proud for it.
Sometimes Mama would drive me to school, but mostly I would get the bus. She wasn’t always herself in the mornings, and I never hated her for it. Sometimes the way Dad would look at her before her medicine kicked in had a little bit of something like hate in it. But I didn’t hate him for that either. I knew he was just missing the Mama he knew.
I don’t live with Mama and Dad anymore in Waldo. I used to live with Bev and Art in Palmetto. Now I still live in Palmetto, but with Art and Grandma now.
Art and Grandma live in a trailer in a park on the edge of the swamp. It used to be Bev and Art’s trailer, and it still is kind of, but Bev isn’t around anymore. Bev died near Easter break. I was sad about it, but not as sad as when Mama died. I just didn’t know Bev like that, and she was older than time, and I think she’d forgive me for not crying as hard for her.
Bev and Art had the trailer my whole life. They’ve had it a long time but not too long because Grandma didn’t grow up there even though Bev and Art are her parents. Grandma was raised in Flint, but the whole family moved down to Bradenton here in Florida when Grandma was fifteen. Auto jobs weren’t working the way they used to, and Art had friends he had made as a merchant marine down here who got him a job. Grandma met my grandpa in Cortez, but she says he only stayed around long enough to knock her up twice and knock her on her ass, so I don’t know him too well. Dad is a Florida man born and bred. And I’m a Florida girl because I was born here too. Dad played football in high school and was going to go to USF to play there too, but his knee got busted. So he went to linecooking instead. He likes cooking, and he says it suits him more than fine. I like that Dad cooks, and I would be scared if he was out playing football now. He’s all wiry and looks like he’d get knocked over by the first wind in a summer storm, so I’m glad he ain’t out getting tackled. Dad’s mom is Grandma. And his Grandpa is Art. And that’s who I live with now.
Bev and Art’s trailer was sat right down next to the swamp. The trailer park itself was a sprawling set of U shaped culdesacs twisting off and into each other. The land had been bought ages ago and shaped for the purposes of getting as many old folks’ trailers squashed in there as possible. But when the land was bought, the swamp was smaller, quiet, and tucked in on herself in a way she wasn’t now. In the past few years or so, Bev said, the swamp had come knocking. No matter how many chain link fences the owners rung around the property line, the marsh kept rising and spilling over itself into the little patches of paved off parking spaces and dead grass. The gators crept closer, the roots eked into the sewage lines, and the land got swallowed, chewed up, and spit back out into messy piles of mud and moss laced through with sticky chunks of pavement.
Bev and Art hadn’t started on the edge of the property line, but as the years got wetter and the swamp got hungrier, they had found their little mobile home pushing closer and closer to the black diamond net of the barrier fence. Each time I went back to visit before I lived there, I swore I saw their grapefruit tree, every time a little less heavy with fruit, sidewinding nearer to the mush on the other side of the fence. The owners dug the trench behind the fence to keep the swamp out, but it didn’t seem to be doing all that much. If the gators ended up winning the grapefruit tug-of-war, I'd be steamed. Everyone in our family knew Bev and Art’s grapefruits were heaps better than the ones you could get in the grocery store. When the fruit falls, I still kick it as hard as I can into the swamp and hope that the too-ripe fruit will be enough for all the things tryna pull the tree closer and closer to its open mouth.
The trailer now just holds me and Grandma and Art. But it looks the same as when Bev lived there. The entrance to the trailer is also like a little hallway to my room and the living room. Art put down plastic grass on the floors a long time ago, so it’s like a little landing strip of lawn leading to the door of my room and the step up into the living room. It’s real narrow, but Grandma got a little desk for me to sit at and do my homework right after the front door. It gets better light than my room, and Grandma says that it protects my eyes, but I got real good vision right now.
May 18th, 2026 -- Ojai, CA
Entry I
I want to tell you a story. It’s a story about The Beast. But it’s also a story about my Mama. And me. And Grandma and Bev and Art. And sometimes about Dad. But it’s mostly about eating grapefruits right off the tree. And fire ants sneaking up your pant leg. And baby gators bathing in the sprinklers at dusk. The important stuff.
My old house was a bitty thing and had big windows, but they were towards the back of our house. Light, like everything is, was distributed not so fairly. My house was short and narrow and full of plants my Mama and I eventually killed. I watched each one grow crisp and crunchy from our disinterest. The one plant we were always able to keep alive was a peace lily. One day, our neighbor’s dog, Betsy, was spending time at our house because her Mama, Rhoda, was out of town for work. Anyways, Betsy discovered a family of pinky rats living inside of it, drawing our attention to the trespassers through some really intense sniffing.
Looking down at them, their bodies looked ridiculous like chubby little baby fingers wriggling around in the dirt. I watched them for hours, 20 bodies writhing as one, micro becoming macro, like a collection of cells blobbing together until they become your heart. I remember their warm smoothness, and how my touching of one forced the pinky’s skin to bunch up into a mountain range of wrinkles. I remember my Mama swatting my hand from the pot full of life, scolding me for dooming them. She told me of how if the mother came back to my smell on her children, she would leave them there to die, not recognizing that the glob before her was her own flesh. My Mama, once a would-be biologist, then a “sales associate”, now stuck at home, told me the cruelness of survival, the break up of the family as a means of protection when the Mama must choose to save herself.
I cried and cursed a world that allowed for that to happen, because that’s all I did those days. We decided as a unit to turn a blind eye and not tell Dad since we knew he would drown them. Mama always said he wasn’t heartless, just overly practical. That night during dinner, I prayed for motherhood and for care. I imagined a world in which my own Mama would take in the baby mice and raise them as her own, showing motherhood to a wider, multi-species audience. I would have two dozen new Stuart Little siblings. It made me smile to myself over my broccoli.
The next day, when I checked on the peace lily, the mice were gone. My Mama told me that the Mama mouse had done her job as a mother and moved the babies to a safer location. That they’d be all soft and warm cuddled up somewhere new together, enjoyin’ each others’ company. I thought of the Mama mouse coming home to her babies unsure at first because they all smelled like a 7 year old kid instead of her bundle of baby mice. But then I thought of her looking real hard at the little guys and knowing in her heart that they were hers, couldn’t be anything but hers. She’d think how that one there looked just like her uncle, and the one in the middle had her daddy’s ears and she’d know. I thought of her smiling softly to herself, pleased she could see them for what they truly were as she packed them all into her little mouse minivan, and set off driving to greener pastures.
I have been thinking about this more as I get older, and I think the dog actually mighta ate them. But the story my Mama told is much nicer.