By Damieka Thomas The first time I was catcalled, I was eleven years old.Since it was laundry day, I was wearing underwear with princesses on them and a yellow shirt that was a little too tight. My hips had spread, taking me from a tall lanky girl whose jeans would not stay up on her waist to this half-woman-half-girl creature. I wished that I’d stayed the same. I was utterly crushed the week before when the scale at my grandma’s house told me that I was 102 pounds. I didn’t eat dinner that …

We settled on the gay neighborhood, my wife Jessie and I, because it was familiar. My older  brother had lived in Berlin in the 1980s, on Goltzstraße, down the block from Café M, one of  Bowie’s haunts during his epoch-making years there. I remember my first pilgrimage to the bar, marveling at the way grizzled, veteran drunks perched themselves at the same wobbly, tin tables  as second-hand-styled teens—leathery, habit-driven creatures of the savannah quenching their  thirst …

The midday cockcrow found me in the kitchen cleaning the mackerels, popularly known as Titus fish, that I had bought from the market. On the white deep freezer in the corner sat my small radio, tuned to a music station. I jiggled my hips with the ease of a palm tree swaying in the wind, my feet tapping on the tiles like a drummer marking time to Angélique Kidjo’s “Wombo Lombo” drifting toward me.  It was a warm Saturday afternoon, the kind that pulled men out of their houses to perch on …

“Lock your chair.”  Tugging the edge of a bouffant mahogany wig with one hand while with the other fondling the folds of an emerald green jersey she’d paired with canary-yellow slacks, Sadie Mayfield replied, “Honestly, I lack the mo-ti-vay-shun.”  “But we talked about this. Your goal was to walk down these stairs on a Sunday morning, get in the car, and be back in church.”  “Oh yes, dear, I do, I do need to be in the lair of the Lord, but phys-ically I cannot.” …

Dana Diehl is an author and educator based in Southern Arizona. Her upcoming collection of short stories, The Earth Room, has won the 2024 Hudson Prize, and two of the stories in this book, "The Woman Through the Door" and "Quicksand," were published in Invisible City. Her other notable works include Our Dreams Might Align (Splice UK, 2018) and TV Girls (New Delta Review, 2018). She holds a BA in Creative Writing from Susquehanna University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Arizona State …