I get home and my kids ask me to explain simple things: Why don’t humans lay eggs? Will it ever snow? Do people stop loving you because you’re far away? They’ve taped a sheet of paper to the wall, to keep a tally of all the mosquitos they killed since we arrived. . .
Audrey tells me to step over the shattered glass at the foot of the escalator. “Come on, Emma,” she says. “You can’t get a good Instagram pic without a little risk.” [. . . ]
There he was carrying a tray of bygone at a San Francisco Hilton. Surrogate for husband #1. Food services manager, not engineer. . .
My father never drank except at Christmastime, I’ve
never seen a brown bottle drain until I was seven, stayed
at my grandmother’s house and knew the skank smell of alcohol, in
winter where cigarette smoke looks ghostly, the
ash tray a black patch of night, he sat on the steps in front
I wake up in the middle of the night. A single star winks at me. Photons fired out thousands, maybe millions of years ago, skimming space, slipping solar systems, sneaking past planets—one true beam sometimes bent by the gulp of gravity,mbut always adhering to its lucky destination.
I have my own personal banshee. Most mornings, usually during my second bowl of cereal, she lets out a soul-melting wail to give me a heads-up on my impending death that day. I used to get worried, but it’s been going on awhile. And I’m still here [. . .]
I made a new email to be professional—obviously I couldn’t go around applying for jobs as , and my cousin wasn’t going to keep paying for that domain name anyway. So I picked something regular. I tried my first initial + last name as my username, but bholman was taken. So then I put my first two initials, and presto, I became blholman, employable person. […]
The act of painting, moving my hand across the canvas, is pure freedom—and fear. I continue to draw lines, wipe parts of them away, then redraw and wipe parts away again—joining, obscuring, and overlaying these lines many times. Different linear elements clash and struggle to be together—to make sense together. . .
For Martha Kaas, half the thrill of going bohemian was not letting her husband suspect that she had. She appeared to commute to work at seven every morning but drove the opposite direction from her former life as a middle school math teacher. She parked in a garage in the garment district and spent the day exploring her creative side from within a rented loft space she shared with three artists: Somi, who worked in plaster of Paris; Fango, who altered thrift store paintings by painting in pop-culture characters; and Asia, upstairs, who made the ceiling breathe whenever she brought in her cadre of dancers [. . .]
Books have been some of the best friends I’ve ever had. They’ve kept me company when I was lonely, taken me on great adventures, helped me explore other cultures and worlds, and given me deep insight into myself and the Universe. But one of the most precious gifts I have received through reading books is healing – spiritual and emotional healing.
Our planet is suffering from an ongoing environmental crisis, and it seems that our citizens are contributing to the problem. Due to misleading information, our community has been focused on what was once considered a healthy, environmentally friendly diet: veganism. However, clinical trials have revealed a new diet that is far superior: carnivorism, an innovative lifestyle that focuses on only eating meat. . .
The plunging water, the plunging light: replenished, stupefied and serene. It is so wide-open that what looks and feels like endless light shines through, then a glinting truth that looks like madness, the bald white hemorrhage of a gravity moving through the moon. . .
The small white flowers are everywhere, you know. They splinter, then splinter again. I wonder if vulnerability isn’t entirely compromised. Just yesterday someone posted a story about people who’ve jumped off the Golden Gate. And lived.
The sun rises. Everything goes on looking iconic [. . .]
One day, before Jassim’s death, Warqa, the dearest of his pigeons, landed above the cote and entered through the tower’s upper entrance, there in the Ashar district in southern Iraq. It was a bit after three in the afternoon when Jassim glimpsed the two wings beating slowly and descending. It was her, Warqa, returning home three years after she had set out on her journey [. . .]
A meme started going around this year that hit close to home. It goes like this: “Men will literally ___ instead of going to therapy.” There are many of them, and a lot are hilarious. They poke fun at deserving men (“Men will literally run for president instead of going to therapy,” “Men will literally invent Facebook instead of going to therapy”) and the toxic behaviors of literary characters (“Men will literally hide a portrait of themselves that ages while their physical form stays young and beautiful instead of going to therapy”).
There was a nearly suffocating smell: smell of old walls, it struck me like the melodies that resurrect in the heart the deepest memories. You know: on that sofa I wept so much when I knew you wouldn’t come back. And today, in the doorway, my soul of that time took hold of me; in an instant my entire past returned. . .
The night before the wedding she’d tried on her wife’s floral party dress, which was of course too tight and too short on her. That she did this—putting a dash of rouge on her cheeks, a black line on her eyelids—might have caused consternation, but her bride-to-be just found it (so she said) funny. [. . .]
I sleep and everything sleeps. The bread dough sleeps in the bowl covered with a damp cloth. The jars are sleeping in the cupboard, each a womb of enameled glass. Quinces sleep, household suns, on embroidered bridal linens in the hope chest. Tomorrow you’ll be fine. Between dreams, I hear you. Tomorrow, you’ll run, as if this were nothing. It’s just that you’re growing. . .
The salon burned down just before they moved in, and Shimmery would always associate the stench of burning plastic with the summer they lived on that hill. Her mom said it was arson, but Shimmery didn’t know who Arson was or what he had against manicures and perms.
I feel I haven’t even made it to adulthood, let alone nearing menopause. My outer woman struggles to have a purpose, but inside I have never felt more capable. I’m panicked. I feel trapped in my body.
iPad’s camera adjusted so she was silhouetted, surrounding flat light showing only the outline of a form. Could have been savasana. A cloud moved, another Zoom self-adjustment, there was her face again. But it wasn’t early savasana. No one could go that long without blinking. I threw on a robe, turned my video on, and unmuted myself [. . .]
I’m 17, and I am always in love, but never with myself. I eat lunch on a Saturday alone.mI spend fifty dollars on books.
I knit an ugly, mustard-colored scarf.
After her husband dies, and the children have helped reshuffle the house, moved out his worn cardigans, his weathered golf bag, his collection of bird skulls, she feels acutely alone. Mornings now, she reads thrillers in the shade of an elm as light dapples the grass. Sometimes his ghost putters around the yard, bending slowly, tracing the ground for signs of tulips. The ghost is a marginal gardener, perhaps something in the afterlife impairs your spatial reasoning.
Like any young teenager, I was passionate about the things I loved and the things I hated. What I loved were my pets, which came in all varieties (dogs, cats, ducks, guinea pigs, birds), my funny storybooks that featured dorky kids like me (too tall, clumsy, self-conscious), and my writing, especially the comical stories I composed with my best friend Izzi (which we crammed full of wordplay) […]
The rain sets its liquid feet down on the pavement ahead of me as I waver my way down the block
with one crutch tucked into me like a loved one.[…]
I have never felt like I belonged to a group of people. As a kid, I spent half my time with the white kids and the other half with the Asian kids. And through it all, I never felt like I truly fit. […]
The low whistle of the northbound train broke a silence made of the shovel’s grating, of birdsong, of the rasp of Eva’s breath. Maud frowned at her daughter, then stepped again on the shoulder of the shovel, forcing the blade into the March soil. This plot of ground, heeled in against a patch of woods, had been worked for garden at one time. […]
He lets his boiling tears well up and spill down his face. In the pulsing world outside Vincent’s consciousness, it becomes difficult to tell whether the man shivers at the cold around him or the cold in his head.
I’m imagining a celebration of love of course, but also of the return to being able to love with our arms, our lips, our bodies close and unmasked.
Pastor says we’re all dead inside. That death is akin to riding a seatless bike. That death is the sound of rain and falling. It is the peculiar way mobile Jesus smiles at me from his particle-board cross. It is how my father died drunk and alone
in Hank’s used car lot.
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