Filmmaker Malic Amalya adapted Rhiannon Argo's short story Boots For Tula from the Baby Remember my Name Anthology, edited by Michelle Tea, into a short film. Check out the website. The film will be coming to festivals soon. For now check out this rad trailer:

From "Boots for Tula"

I jolt awake in the middle of the night and I could forget where I am, forget how I got here to this small place with windows smaller then the moon. I can hear Blue yelling at the demons behind his eyes in his sleep from across the house. Tula is asleep on next to me; she could sleep through anything. My hand slides off the side of the mattress and onto the cold hardwood floor and I feel around for my backpack and grab my Marlboro Reds and my sketchbook.

As I smoke I look over at Tula's pale skin glowing in the darkness. Back home her body used to make some kind of sense to me but now it's vague and blurred around the edges- skin is as chilly as the hard wood floors, and I can't get past the usual bored look in her eyes and blank laughter to what is familiar. Like how we used to get tangled up in each other's limbs laying on the couch all day in the den of her mom's house. Tula always had to stay home and baby-sit her little sister's baby. Her sister was seventeen and had dropped out of school but she worked full-time and since Tula didn't have a job their mom made her baby-sit. The baby, who we called Gummy was really cute, he was half-Asian and would squiggle around everywhere and chew on everything with his gummy mouth and we would lay around all day watch TV or plotting moving to the city.

What if I could turn Tula into a super hero? I breathe in the smell of my assorted Sharpie pens. She would have red splattering swirls for her hair and an oval mouth. She would have those gold boots she wanted strapped to her like a golden armor. I learned to draw from the graffiti boys at the alternative high school I went to, and I mostly draw hip-hop girls or skater girls with real big pants or spray can welding girls with big cartoon hands spreading up across the paper. If Tula were a superhero it would be hidden beneath the colors, she would be silently lethal, like when the enemy touched her she might crack open and her guts would be toxic. Plutonium and sticky things would ooze from her lips. She would be like a swaying doll of a time bomb waiting till she had the room hypnotized before she detonated.

'I know that I'm going to die young,' Tula always insisted to me, 'Go out with a bang.' I can even hear it now, so faint beneath the street noise, a soft ticking in her chest, as I curl closer into her sleeping body.