This is a short story I wrote about a group of teenage girls. It appeared in Pank Magazine, in April 2009.
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Sempe has a small blue star on her right cheek that everyone thinks is a tattoo. It’s not, it’s what, when she looks in the mirror, makes her think most of her father whose skin is blue black and the difference between his skin and her mother’s which is as pale as the rest of her. She thinks that the relationship between the star and the rest of her body is a lot like her parents: her Dad, who perches quietly in the corner of her mother’s life, saying little, meaning everything there is; and her Mom, warm, serene, the soft sandy beach on which her starfish father basks, ruler of a grainy empire.