Our home is at the company town’s edge, where the desert breaks on the green lawns. Beyond our yard is the wash, a flood basin. It has no water in it as there has been no rain. Where we are in the foothills, the wash is left natural and broad. Down the valley, past city limits, it narrows to concrete channels funneling west to ocean, but you can't know that from here; there's too much haze and it’s too far. The laboratory lies opposite the wash, hemmed in by the sifter nets. Even when you can’t see the nets, you can take a deep breath and know they are there. You can take a deep breath because they are there, filtering the toxic dust, claiming this patch of Southern California desert. At their tops, floating lights blink to alert low-flying aircraft, although we live in a no-fly zone. My sister and I used to talk about running away. It was for the yawn of late nights and idle afternoons. Past the film-sifter nets it’d be easy: bike the empty flats of the freeway and then when we reached the tollways we’d let them sweep us on their moving tracks, and then we’d only have to hold on. Fran was good at planning. I leaned into the pitch of her excitement until I, too, was excited. We would get distracted by the exercise so that by the end of packing and preparing we’d calmed down. It was enough to know that we could. But then one day it wasn’t enough, because Fran said, Let’s go, and we did. We must’ve been struck with the blue sky bliss. Some are more sensitive to it than others. It happens in years when the heat of the drought steps back, when the wind direction is right, when the clouds scud from the other side of the mountains and open over the valleys. The storms don’t come often but when they do they pound and flood, since in the desert nothing holds the ground down. The reservoirs fill to the brim. The wash blooms with water. The hillside rushes down the wash. Snow returns to peaks and streams to canyons. The wildfires are burning elsewhere. When the storms quiet, we find the sky’s been scraped clean. The foothills are green as if they were never brown. We don’t need the town’s perimeter of nets to sift through the dust, the particles in the wind poisonous and invisible that’ll clog your nostrils and tar the pockets of your lungs. And we don’t need to stay inside the city line, because the air is good enough to breathe. Caravans form a string of beads on the old trackless highways. They are returning to No Man’s Land. After the rains people from normal cities up and go, just like that. Camp in the near wilderness, or in the boarded-up suburbs, the outskirt cities that were never encircled in sifter nets, after the last dust bowl proved a point that’d been proven already: no one should live here. The bivouacs rise and fall within a week, generally, but then there can be good months, months swept by a procession of downpours towing fresh air and expansive sight lines promising it will only be blue skies now, and the strip mall shanty towns kick awake and lawless. There are names for it: blue madness, blue chasers. You can count backward from your birthday and figure if you’re a blue sky baby, if that’s something you want to know. The need fleeces over people, not always the ones you’d expect, and they go have their mid life crisis or spiritual awakening. Whether or not they’ll have jobs and relationships when they crawl back is up for grabs. The full-timers hate them for coming, we hate them for going. (You can tell who lives full-time outside the sifter nets by their persistent, particular cough. For a generation, broadened by those who couldn’t afford the newer tech, you can also spot them by the calluses at their mouths, skin thickened by the adhesion of pseudskin air masks—scars which only the rich could remove.) But for me it’s not about the blue sky revelers or the full-timers. Their cities draw me. How some places exist only after rain. That blue sky afternoon we donned jelecool sunbreakers and crammed our bags with clothes, provisions stolen from the pantry, useless scrip saved from allowances plus a few actual large bills stolen from the shoebox up high in the closet that Mom and Dad didn’t know we knew about. We set the sunbreakers to a clear tan shade instead of the usual iridescent brights, hoisted our duffels, and walked our bikes out the backyard to the wash. The stormwater swelled the prickly pear cactus acid-green. Their needles stood white in contrast. We forded the newborn streams, climbing boulders to avoid thickets of brush, and, lofting our bikes, debated leaving them to rust. Fran told me not to be a baby. With the haze lifted and the sun burning, the water was bright enough to blind. I slipped often, thrown off-balance by my backpack, and cold flooded my sneaker. Stepped on yuccas toppled by the flooding and felt sorry for the ivory bells of their flowers. Soon enough I had difficulty picking out which house in the development was ours. From the drowned culvert we crossed to the road, straps digging into our shoulders, backs straining. I struggled to steady my bike. Crouching behind bushes if a car came, counting Mississippi’s for it to pass. Fran’s bike was chili pepper red and would be easily spotted. My ears stretched for the whoop of a siren, my eyes conjured flashing headlights when the sun found metal in the road, glancing off a car. The gate of the film-sifter nets came into view. The last door before the true outside. The nets stood so tall and near you couldn’t see their tops. We neared the guard kiosk and the window lowered. The roar of wind billowing the nets was deafening. A waterfall with no water. The guard smiled so as to remind us we were children who had strayed to where we shouldn’t be. Fran licked her lips. She said, I’m sorry, and she seemed it, and turned back the way we’d come. Francine admitted that she’d not got us unaccompanied minor passes to leave town without a parent or guardian, that there was no such thing. I asked her why, if she’d known the plan wouldn’t work, we did all this. She didn’t answer and then she did. She said she wanted to see how close she’d get. We were back before anyone realized we’d been gone, and so we acted like nothing was different, all was normal—and she was a good actress, I thought, and then I realized she wasn’t acting, she was calmed. We stopped trying; Francine didn’t want to, nor did she want to pretend, to plan at going. I supposed I was the only one who’d see the nets and miss that blue sky day when we left and meant to stay gone, our duffels heavy on our shoulders.

〰️

Our home is at the company town’s edge, where the desert breaks on the green lawns. Beyond our yard is the wash, a flood basin. It has no water in it as there has been no rain. Where we are in the foothills, the wash is left natural and broad. Down the valley, past city limits, it narrows to concrete channels funneling west to ocean, but you can't know that from here; there's too much haze and it’s too far. The laboratory lies opposite the wash, hemmed in by the sifter nets. Even when you can’t see the nets, you can take a deep breath and know they are there. You can take a deep breath because they are there, filtering the toxic dust, claiming this patch of Southern California desert. At their tops, floating lights blink to alert low-flying aircraft, although we live in a no-fly zone. My sister and I used to talk about running away. It was for the yawn of late nights and idle afternoons. Past the film-sifter nets it’d be easy: bike the empty flats of the freeway and then when we reached the tollways we’d let them sweep us on their moving tracks, and then we’d only have to hold on. Fran was good at planning. I leaned into the pitch of her excitement until I, too, was excited. We would get distracted by the exercise so that by the end of packing and preparing we’d calmed down. It was enough to know that we could. But then one day it wasn’t enough, because Fran said, Let’s go, and we did. We must’ve been struck with the blue sky bliss. Some are more sensitive to it than others. It happens in years when the heat of the drought steps back, when the wind direction is right, when the clouds scud from the other side of the mountains and open over the valleys. The storms don’t come often but when they do they pound and flood, since in the desert nothing holds the ground down. The reservoirs fill to the brim. The wash blooms with water. The hillside rushes down the wash. Snow returns to peaks and streams to canyons. The wildfires are burning elsewhere. When the storms quiet, we find the sky’s been scraped clean. The foothills are green as if they were never brown. We don’t need the town’s perimeter of nets to sift through the dust, the particles in the wind poisonous and invisible that’ll clog your nostrils and tar the pockets of your lungs. And we don’t need to stay inside the city line, because the air is good enough to breathe. Caravans form a string of beads on the old trackless highways. They are returning to No Man’s Land. After the rains people from normal cities up and go, just like that. Camp in the near wilderness, or in the boarded-up suburbs, the outskirt cities that were never encircled in sifter nets, after the last dust bowl proved a point that’d been proven already: no one should live here. The bivouacs rise and fall within a week, generally, but then there can be good months, months swept by a procession of downpours towing fresh air and expansive sight lines promising it will only be blue skies now, and the strip mall shanty towns kick awake and lawless. There are names for it: blue madness, blue chasers. You can count backward from your birthday and figure if you’re a blue sky baby, if that’s something you want to know. The need fleeces over people, not always the ones you’d expect, and they go have their mid life crisis or spiritual awakening. Whether or not they’ll have jobs and relationships when they crawl back is up for grabs. The full-timers hate them for coming, we hate them for going. (You can tell who lives full-time outside the sifter nets by their persistent, particular cough. For a generation, broadened by those who couldn’t afford the newer tech, you can also spot them by the calluses at their mouths, skin thickened by the adhesion of pseudskin air masks—scars which only the rich could remove.) But for me it’s not about the blue sky revelers or the full-timers. Their cities draw me. How some places exist only after rain. That blue sky afternoon we donned jelecool sunbreakers and crammed our bags with clothes, provisions stolen from the pantry, useless scrip saved from allowances plus a few actual large bills stolen from the shoebox up high in the closet that Mom and Dad didn’t know we knew about. We set the sunbreakers to a clear tan shade instead of the usual iridescent brights, hoisted our duffels, and walked our bikes out the backyard to the wash. The stormwater swelled the prickly pear cactus acid-green. Their needles stood white in contrast. We forded the newborn streams, climbing boulders to avoid thickets of brush, and, lofting our bikes, debated leaving them to rust. Fran told me not to be a baby. With the haze lifted and the sun burning, the water was bright enough to blind. I slipped often, thrown off-balance by my backpack, and cold flooded my sneaker. Stepped on yuccas toppled by the flooding and felt sorry for the ivory bells of their flowers. Soon enough I had difficulty picking out which house in the development was ours. From the drowned culvert we crossed to the road, straps digging into our shoulders, backs straining. I struggled to steady my bike. Crouching behind bushes if a car came, counting Mississippi’s for it to pass. Fran’s bike was chili pepper red and would be easily spotted. My ears stretched for the whoop of a siren, my eyes conjured flashing headlights when the sun found metal in the road, glancing off a car. The gate of the film-sifter nets came into view. The last door before the true outside. The nets stood so tall and near you couldn’t see their tops. We neared the guard kiosk and the window lowered. The roar of wind billowing the nets was deafening. A waterfall with no water. The guard smiled so as to remind us we were children who had strayed to where we shouldn’t be. Fran licked her lips. She said, I’m sorry, and she seemed it, and turned back the way we’d come. Francine admitted that she’d not got us unaccompanied minor passes to leave town without a parent or guardian, that there was no such thing. I asked her why, if she’d known the plan wouldn’t work, we did all this. She didn’t answer and then she did. She said she wanted to see how close she’d get. We were back before anyone realized we’d been gone, and so we acted like nothing was different, all was normal—and she was a good actress, I thought, and then I realized she wasn’t acting, she was calmed. We stopped trying; Francine didn’t want to, nor did she want to pretend, to plan at going. I supposed I was the only one who’d see the nets and miss that blue sky day when we left and meant to stay gone, our duffels heavy on our shoulders. 〰️

Publications, Education, & Awards

‍ ‍Iowa Writers’ Workshop MFA. Fiction. 2017. Pomona College BA. Political Science. 2014.


works in progress

I’m working on two speculative novels at the moment.

We hid in the University concert hall with our creations. The police had cinched and separated our group from the others, but we’d found this relative calm to huddle in, panting from exertion, our throats and nostrils seared, our eyes stinging from bitter gas. Our creations shivered against us, their six-chambered hearts beating against our chests. There were shouts. Someone, a Natalist or an Only Child, we had no way to tell, attempted to enter the side door we’d barricaded behind us. They pounded and kicked at the paneled wood. We held our breath and hoped our creatures understood the need for quiet. Lev gestured to me to stay still. I hadn’t realized I’d been rocking in a crouch, head angled down. Sweat broke and chilled on my skin. We’d tracked in dirt and an orange dye. Then the pounding abruptly ceased, as if the person on the other side had vanished. Outside were shots that might’ve been gunfire, or flash bangs, or the crack of a car rammed through stone. We didn’t connect these facts, but let them remain parallel to each other. There is value in isolating information from pattern, for keeping the obvious result in abeyance. Nicky’s eyes were rounded with fear. The others whispered but Nicky couldn’t join in with our devices disabled. I mimed, as well as I could, that the danger had passed. She understood my meaning well enough, yet I wished I’d learned more ASL, so we could communicate. Her glarers had slipped down her cheeks. She leaned her head on my shoulder. We waited a long time for the lasting silence to come, and breathed out when it did come, although it meant that we had failed. We washed ourselves in the gleaming bathroom sinks and soiled the enamel with the orange dye that ran down our limbs and faces, down the drain. I pressed my creation with a dampened paper towel from the dispenser. The glarers I left where they were, for any cameras that might log us on the way back. We didn’t leave through the side door. There was a body blocking it. We left through the main entrance instead, under the long shadows of doric columns and down the gracious podium steps, littered with the aftermath of the riot. The quads were trampled muddy, the encampments had been raised, the statues vandalized, fountains clogged with floating posters and cardboard signs; heavy bootprints and rubber bullets and bright pink rounds and zip-ties and water bottles stamped into the soil, as if pressed as a keepsake into a slab of clay. The grass was slick with dew and something darker. Blades of grass stuck to my white ankles. We hid our creatures in our shirts or backpacks, but came across no one. The sun rose over the crowns of mature trees and cleaved across roofs. We didn’t talk about what we’d seen, or what might change now. I was crying, but I wasn’t crying with relief that we’d survived the night, or with dismay that our ideals had been smashed, or with concern for what the future held. Perhaps I should have been. I wanted to share with Nicky what I felt because I was sure she would understand. I couldn’t: they were still blocking closetalk and Nicky’s hearing aid didn’t work without it. I wanted to tell Nicky what I knew, what I’d felt for the very first time, but I hadn’t the vocabulary to tell her—and even if I had, it wasn’t the right moment. So I kept to myself my feelings, as we snuck back into grad student housing. In those hours gathered in the dark, with my body numbing to the cold of the marble floor beneath me, my creature’s open mouth slimed against my collarbone, I’d felt something new. I loved my creation, not as a reflected love for what it represented or might become, or as a personal achievement, or for the people who helped it come into this world, helped care and train it. That protracted night, clutching my creature to my skin, afraid of the forces outside eager to strip it from me, I loved it. I loved it entirely, discreetly, without reference to another person or purpose. I loved it so much it overwhelmed me.

〰️

We hid in the University concert hall with our creations. The police had cinched and separated our group from the others, but we’d found this relative calm to huddle in, panting from exertion, our throats and nostrils seared, our eyes stinging from bitter gas. Our creations shivered against us, their six-chambered hearts beating against our chests. There were shouts. Someone, a Natalist or an Only Child, we had no way to tell, attempted to enter the side door we’d barricaded behind us. They pounded and kicked at the paneled wood. We held our breath and hoped our creatures understood the need for quiet. Lev gestured to me to stay still. I hadn’t realized I’d been rocking in a crouch, head angled down. Sweat broke and chilled on my skin. We’d tracked in dirt and an orange dye. Then the pounding abruptly ceased, as if the person on the other side had vanished. Outside were shots that might’ve been gunfire, or flash bangs, or the crack of a car rammed through stone. We didn’t connect these facts, but let them remain parallel to each other. There is value in isolating information from pattern, for keeping the obvious result in abeyance. Nicky’s eyes were rounded with fear. The others whispered but Nicky couldn’t join in with our devices disabled. I mimed, as well as I could, that the danger had passed. She understood my meaning well enough, yet I wished I’d learned more ASL, so we could communicate. Her glarers had slipped down her cheeks. She leaned her head on my shoulder. We waited a long time for the lasting silence to come, and breathed out when it did come, although it meant that we had failed. We washed ourselves in the gleaming bathroom sinks and soiled the enamel with the orange dye that ran down our limbs and faces, down the drain. I pressed my creation with a dampened paper towel from the dispenser. The glarers I left where they were, for any cameras that might log us on the way back. We didn’t leave through the side door. There was a body blocking it. We left through the main entrance instead, under the long shadows of doric columns and down the gracious podium steps, littered with the aftermath of the riot. The quads were trampled muddy, the encampments had been raised, the statues vandalized, fountains clogged with floating posters and cardboard signs; heavy bootprints and rubber bullets and bright pink rounds and zip-ties and water bottles stamped into the soil, as if pressed as a keepsake into a slab of clay. The grass was slick with dew and something darker. Blades of grass stuck to my white ankles. We hid our creatures in our shirts or backpacks, but came across no one. The sun rose over the crowns of mature trees and cleaved across roofs. We didn’t talk about what we’d seen, or what might change now. I was crying, but I wasn’t crying with relief that we’d survived the night, or with dismay that our ideals had been smashed, or with concern for what the future held. Perhaps I should have been. I wanted to share with Nicky what I felt because I was sure she would understand. I couldn’t: they were still blocking closetalk and Nicky’s hearing aid didn’t work without it. I wanted to tell Nicky what I knew, what I’d felt for the very first time, but I hadn’t the vocabulary to tell her—and even if I had, it wasn’t the right moment. So I kept to myself my feelings, as we snuck back into grad student housing. In those hours gathered in the dark, with my body numbing to the cold of the marble floor beneath me, my creature’s open mouth slimed against my collarbone, I’d felt something new. I loved my creation, not as a reflected love for what it represented or might become, or as a personal achievement, or for the people who helped it come into this world, helped care and train it. That protracted night, clutching my creature to my skin, afraid of the forces outside eager to strip it from me, I loved it. I loved it entirely, discreetly, without reference to another person or purpose. I loved it so much it overwhelmed me. 〰️