I sit at my family’s kitchen table, toes lightly skimming the cool linoleum beneath, with five pristine pieces of white paper before me. They’re freshly torn from an untouched notebook, the edges ripped along their perforated lines with a surgical precision; no excess flakes lingering about like an unseemly hangnail to mar their perfection. They…

Throughout my life, people have always had strong opinions about my name: Blaize. Some find it cool, peppering me with questions like, “Were your parents stoners who liked to blaze it up?”—they’re always crestfallen when I tell them no. Others are baffled, demanding I prove it’s my legal name—in more than one instance, I’ve been…

I pledge allegiance to the bottom line, Of the United Corporations of America, And to the Oligarchy for which it crumbled, A fractured nation, under Capitalism, readily divisible, With liberty and justice for few.

Throughout my life, I’ve managed to gather quite a collection of scars. There’s one that spans the length of my left forearm, a token of a particularly gruesome football injury—let’s just say arms aren’t meant to bend in certain ways. Another, on my right calf, came to be after a poorly judged slide on a…

I don’t remember when it first appeared. One night, it was simply there. The face in my window. I was young then. Young enough to have my tale about a nightly visitor lingering outside my window laughed off by those dubbed older and wiser. It used to scare me. I don’t know why it chose…