The Polaroid Wears Ray-Bans
A woman checks into a hyper-curated Airbnb in the hills and finds herself stalked by Polaroids of glamorous ghosts who lounge, pose, and decay behind mirrored Ray-Bans. The deeper she falls into the house’s glittering logic, the harder it becomes to tell whether she’s escaping a haunting or being styled into one.
Noncompliant: A Sunglassed Elegy from Camarillo
The waiting room at Camarillo State Hospital is still occupied by the dead, each of them hidden behind sunglasses and the institutional fictions that once contained them. As one woman moves back through the wreckage of her own history there, witnessing becomes its own form of resurrection.
Solarium Girl: A Devotion
A tanning bed in a Los Angeles salon becomes transfixed by the one girl who enters it like a secret and leaves part of herself behind each time. As its devotion deepens, it begins to imagine that keeping her safe and keeping her are the same thing.
Writing The California Fever Dream
“Outside, the sky began changing colors like it was unsure which version of the sunset to run. A Joshua Tree caught fire, silently. Beautifully. And then reassembled itself in reverse.”
— Static at the edge of 29 Palms
“She could taste the day. Hot pennies. Sunscreen. The faint chemical sweetness of melted plastic… She told herself this was normal. California normal. A climate that didn’t ask permission.”
— What California Makes
“The heat was biblical and immediate. By the time she had crossed the wash and climbed the low rise beyond it, her shirt was sticking to her back and her thoughts had gone strangely bright around the edges.”