Study in Self-Defense: Lubbock, Texas
When I bought a house after my divorce, nighttime developed a sharp edge. I no longer shared walls with my neighbors, as I had in the high-rise apartment I rented during the years of my separation. Now, if my husband or some other intruder burst through the front door and I screamed for help, who...
Known Killers
1. Our first day in the projects, I witnessed —— beat his woman bloody in the courtyard while several grown men watched from their doorsteps. I grabbed an aluminum bat—Black Magic—from the house, but my mother would not let me swing. We can’t create problems for ourselves, she whispered. I was fourteen. 2. $$$$, whom...
Jack Ruby’s .38 Colt Cobra
Because even after you put death aside—keeping in your sights not Oswald’s ruptured gut, but the very idea of the gun beginning to grow, becoming a new kind of try-me, a sure bet he could grip, strap to his thigh, flaunt to protect the earnings of his half-assed strippers and ventriloquist acts and hustled bottles...
Transgender Day of Remembrance: A Found Essay
Compiled and arranged from the “Remarks” section of Transphobia vs. Transrespect research project (2014) “Trans Murder Monitoring results: TMM TDOR 2014 Update.” Brunete was beaten to death with a stick. The victim was shot by two men on a motorcycle in front of a motel. The victim was shot in the head. The suspected murderer...
Crime Scene Photo
Greenfield, Tennessee, a farm and factory town of twenty-two hundred in the state’s rural northwest corner, has never been more than a place between places, one in a long list of towns to be passed through along kudzu-choked U.S. Highway 45 on the way south to Jackson or Memphis. More than a century ago now...
Frivolous
On Monday morning, as I do every weekday, I walk up the hill from the subway stop at 161st Street. The Bronx District Courthouse presides over the Grand Concourse, the pale limestone shining in the morning light. I show my badge to the officer at the podium, and cross the marble lobby to the elevator....
Alive
There is a serial killer at work in Baton Rouge, and so, as I drive into the city on this rainy mid-August afternoon to visit family, I move from simply alert to hyper alert. In addition to the three murdered women, there have been four attempted abductions in the past two weeks; the last woman...
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