I’ve worn different races as if they were shades of pantyhose. Many times, they felt just as constricting. They were not always adopted willingly, but sometimes forced on me. I am mixed; my father is white and my mother is an immigrant from El Salvador. But like all children, I started out raceless, like a […]
I keep the brown blur in my peripheral vision and trudge up hill, stinking of sweat and Deep Woods Off. A few yards off the trail, the canine dervish whirls her speckled body, thick neck thrashing in the air. She springs high on muscular legs and drops, scraping her face in the dirt, raging to […]
I am not your stereotype. People often have a preconceived notion of what Attention Deficit Disorder looks like. They imagine little children running around like wild animals, having temper tantrums, not paying attention, lacking the desire to learn. When I explain that the scene they imagine isn’t anything like my life, they don’t believe me. […]
“You can’t wear that,” the guard says. “It shows too much skin.” “Wah? I’m not showing no skin,” the girl says. She raises her arms in protest and flashes her midriff. The guard points at her bare skin with the electronic wand. “That’s what I’m talking about,” he says. “We told you last time, too. […]
“A woman like that is not a woman, quite I have been her kind.” Anne Sexton For my first appointment at the fertility specialist’s office I wear all grey except for my boots; these are shiny, cherry red. The four-inch heel makes me look tall and lean, as does the loose grey wrap I’m wearing. […]
Tonight I lie here, mostly awake, sometimes half-asleep, praying the phone doesn’t ring. It’s the early ’90s. In my second year of college, I’m volunteering with the local women’s shelter. Tonight I’m covering the sexual assault help line. I usually cover domestic violence and have received a few calls on that line, but never on […]
Fact: My hands are too short to reach mom’s cancer. How Cancer Changed Me: My logic is the safest thing I have. I write lists about logic. I make everything neat and ordered. There is a careful, measured safety in lists. I can see how far they stretch. Nothing sneaks up on me. I love […]
On the morning of June 26, 2000, I awake with a weird pain in my right side. I stretch, take a deep breath, and assess the situation. No other symptoms. “I must have slept funny,” I think, as I take my dog Lancelot out to pee. It’s a Friday. A glorious Vermont summer day. My […]
You’ve been writing for only six years and you’re almost sixty. You’ve outlived your mother by five years; you’re feeling the press of time. It’s like the last stages of labor, you know you’ve got to push and birth something. Anything. So what if one of your writing teachers says of your stories, “Two or […]
There’s a girl in a broad-striped shirt with her hands in the back pockets of her Daisy Dukes, legs crossed, one tan knee over the other. She’s standing in front of a fence in front of an apartment complex whose name you do not yet know. Her right knee, creaseless, is the one you can […]
In the spring of 2007, my father and I are discussing something important when the guy in the car behind us at the green light raps his horn. In the passenger seat, my father, a polite man of eighty years does not flinch, just glances in the rearview mirror and says, ‟Hold your horses, buddy. […]
Sticky Skirts Fearful of showing more skin than was appropriate for my grandmother’s funeral, I pulled my black lined skirt downward for the hundredth time. The problem was, no matter how hard I pulled I couldn’t help but feel like the skirt was still riding up. I blamed my obsessive thought patterns on the humidity. […]
My car speeds north along the nearly deserted two-lane stretch of Highway 101 towards Waldport. My muscles are stiff from my hike up Cape Perpetua, and I’m anxious to get back to the house where I am staying for a hot shower. The sky is grey with pending rain and the ocean crashes against the rocks…
Up at five. I rise before she does. I begin cleaning by six. It takes seven hours. It never ceases to humiliate: cleaning another woman’s home. Take a break to wake Mrs. Pattershall, serve her tea, and provide a hand to help her out of bed. After dressing, she gets under my feet. I think […]
MY FIRST TIME. Wouldn’t it be great if I remembered the first bribe I ever gave? I’d love to shine a light on its romantic aspect, the shameful complicity between the briber and the bribed, the shy smiles exchanged. Maybe I’d write something like, It was a first kiss: loss of innocence paired with the […]
I. Twice a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays, I saw them. Oiled, buttered up, ready for consumption. And though black writers hate to describe skin color in terms of food, it’s true: their bodies were all the shades of brown you’d see on a Thanksgiving dinner table. That’s not the important thing. This is. Heads […]
Just about the time that you really want to talk, you can’t say a word. The train talks for you; machinery rumbling beneath you, wheels turning faster than sound, faster than vision. You look down and it’s a blur: green, brown, green. That night we curled up in the grain car, trying to compact our […]
I like to think I have it all figured out. Take the rifle. As long as I can remember, the gun was there, resting next to the exercise bike in our house in New York. My father probably assumed he’d hid it well, draping it under several terry cloth robes…
—1— Twenty minutes after I picked up my mother at the El Plumerillo airport in Mendoza, Argentina, we heard a popping sound near the back of our rental car. When the Chevy Corsica began to drag, I slowed down. A man of about thirty, with curly black hair, a pale face, and wide, excited eyes […]
Hours before the spaceship burst from the mountain, the four of us broke camp in snow just below tree line. Right away I fell behind, panting, leaning into the slope and a wind so warm you’d think it had cooked all night in Shasta’s summit crater before streaming down on us.
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I want to see Trayvon Martin cutting class and making B’s and C’s and getting the lecture about applying himself and the lecture about setting goals and the one about potential and the other one about priorities. I want to see Trayvon Martin blow off his parents because old people don’t know anything.
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