Burnt Tongues: An Anthology of Transgressive Short Stories

Some beliefs die hard, and when they shudder their last breath, it shakes your insides like a million butterflies are trapped in your chest. A feeling like dying, like fear, like falling

Still others found themselves declared mentally insane for possessing traits applauded in men but inappropriate for women. Assertiveness. Questioning authority. Self-dependence.

For every incident you probably didn’t survive, there’d be as many alternate lives where you improbably did.

Some decisions are like standing at the edge of a precipice with a parachute strapped to your back. It’s doubtful the fall will kill you, but in those seconds before the leap is an imperfect moment of clarity, an understanding that the decision, once made, cannot be undone.

YOU POUR THE ONE PART BATH SALTS INTO THE TWO PARTS PESTICIDE, and how long you’ve got depends on which website you trust.

Questions for the article: Does man’s ability to personalize his deviation make it less repulsive? Easier to pursue? More likely to be shared

In 1887, Nellie Bly shocked the world with her exposé on the miserable conditions and abusive treatment of inmates in New York City’s Bellevue Hospital’s Asylum for the Insane. The facts she documented came from her personal experience, faking mental instability to become the world’s first undercover journalist

The people stereotyped as overloading cars and living in cramped spaces like ants in the wall, they were outliving the rest of the city. Everybody laugh

a heart attack.

Then there’s zolpidem—the quick-acting imidazopyridine — and a bottleful of those would let me drift off to sleep, escorting me into a pillowy coma as my heart slowly stops beating

When I ask if the doctor stuck a long Q-tip down the back of her throat, she says, “I don’t let anyone stick anything down my throat. Unless, that is, he’s really cute.”