It’s Monday at the top of the world. It’s morning, but the sun hasn’t risen in weeks. The elementary school where I teach is a fifteen-minute walk across the tundra and past the lagoon where Arctic swans glide during the brief summer season. In the fall, snowy owls fly overhead in the dusky morning hours […]
There was an abandoned house a few miles from where I grew up. It was out on Mt. Mica Mine Road, past the egg farm, past the little cemetery that held just a few toothlike stones, up a big hill and then down the other side. If you did it right, if you let the […]
In 1973, the Squirrel Cage was just another scummy go-go bar on a street filled with businesses that paired well with scummy go-go bars. It’s gone now, of course; replaced by an above ground pool company—almost an elbow-to-the-ribs attempt at baptismal humor. The Squirrel Cage sat at the crossroads of Austin Highway and Walzem Road […]
By the time I brought my son to vacation in Hawai’i, I knew something was wrong. With him, with me, with the world—take your pick. I remember it as perfect; the month we spent lost among the wild sunshine of the deep Pacific. A time outside of time. Our special little bubble of happiness when, […]
Call me Ismail, not Ishmael, which rhymes with wish fail, or Tom, Dick, or Harry, which rhyme with nothing that rings true to me, just because you cannot be bothered to learn to pronounce my name. It goes like this, three separate syllables: Is—like the prolonged break of a wave; ma—half of Mama; il—like a […]
If you ask me now, I could still do it. Not all of it, of course—not now, not anymore. The more esoteric things—the notes for B minor, the exactitude between allegro and allegretto—those have long since been forgotten, faded with time and disuse. But hand me the sheet music, my bent Bach primers and blue Schumann […]
A. Description The Work’s medium was oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus, birthed one December day in 1960, Brooklyn. Boy child from brush strokes of Puerto Rican mother and Haitian father. Face framing wide-set brown eyes and wide refined nose. Our eyes are drawn to the thin line that divided his naked torso in […]
I hang up from haggling with a software rep and realize my second cup of coffee is cold. Typical. I get lost in what I’m doing and rarely finish a cup of anything. In the kitchen, my husband is half done preparing a poor-boy lunch: taco shell rejects—the ones in each box a little too […]
The typewriter’s film of dust: I could have written in it with a finger. It had been a while since she’d found reason to type anything. The last thing, perhaps, a fresh list of contacts she carried around with her, knowing she could not be trusted to know, might not remember. Her family, our names, […]
This essay will have a dead daddy in it. There will be some other stuff in here, but it will mainly be about a dead daddy (mine). There are some who want to know the details. I am not one of those people. But I’m also not generally a reader of dead daddy stories. Add […]
My daughter, Angie, splashes in the swimming pool one minute, then jumps into the hot tub the next minute, at our rented beach house in Kea’au, a tiny town on the eastern side of Hawaii’s Big Island. Afternoon clouds break as she goes from one extreme to the other, sending herself into alternating fits of […]
My brother Mark is the essence of juvey cool, hair slicked back in a perfect duck’s ass, white T-shirt with a pack of Camels rolled up in one sleeve, Levis like the skin he was born in, pointy-toed shoes that the Mexican kids call cockroach killers. He is sixteen, months from dropping out of high […]
I hallucinate. Only at night, only when I travel for work. The drug-induced visions are violent but worth it. I take an anti-malaria medicine to stay alive. Malaria nearly killed my ex-husband when we lived in Vietnam. His fevers reached 107.5. He convulsed, raged, and sweat. He should have died, like our friend Clive. The […]
Before I was confirmed into the Catholic Church, I was reprimanded by a Buddhist monk in a forest thick with mosquitos. My khaki pants stuck to my legs and my collared shirt clung to my damp neck. The hijab I had worn earlier that day was still in the car along with five or six […]
It is still dark when I leave the house, bags and rolling cart full of teaching materials stacked up by the door. I let the silence of the road and the slowly lightening landscape pull me into the waking world, coffee clasped tight in one hand, while the other hand steers. I drive for an […]
My obsession with Michael Jackson began the day he died. Before then, I owned a handful of his albums and clawed my arms in the air like a “Thriller” zombie at dance parties, but so did millions of other people. On June 25, 2009, I was working in the office of a museum in Seattle, […]
Grief is a mouse in the house. Unless it’s taken outside now and then, it will nibble a person away and leave an empty husk behind. No one survives death, of course, but some do not survive grief. I discovered this when my wife Evelyn unexpectedly died of a heart attack in her forties. I […]
Sharlotte walked into the A.A. meeting just as the Arizona sunset was throwing peach and orange colors on the walls of the cheap commercial space. A loose, dingy white T-shirt barely concealed the inner tube of weight she’d gained from a cocktail of psychotropics. Her thin, unwashed hair looked like an animal pelt pasted onto […]
I was six years old the first time I saw a mystery novel on my older cousin’s bookshelf with my own name, Judy Bolton, on the spine. I couldn’t stop my finger from tracing the letters boldly printed across the front of that hardcover book. I like to think my father chose the name for […]
It’s still dark, 0500 on a December morning. From our ship out in the harbor we see the lights of San Diego sparkle on the horizon. We are excited by the lights. Because for so much of the last four months the horizon has merely blended with the blue of the ocean. Nearly one thousand […]
I lived on Waverly Place then, around the corner from the local cruising stretch of Christopher Street. The acquaintances I collected at the time thought I was somebody, had to be somebody to live in the center of Greenwich Village. But of course I was the nobody Rilke spoke of in the “Homeless Waif,” Ich […]
It’s terrible when you’re defeated by a bag of oranges. The oranges were just a purchase, one of many at the supermarket. It was such a tiny act, so lost in the millions of ordinary tasks of the day that I don’t remember the details. Maybe it was Tuesday and raining, or Thursday and annoyingly […]
“I find more bitter than death the woman who is a snare, whose heart is a trap and whose hands are chains. The man who pleases God will escape her, but the sinner she will ensnare.” —Ecclesiastes 7:26 Some interstate in the south. I’m around seven. We’ve been in the car for hours—en route to […]
I have started going to Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meetings—the acronym is SLAA, pronounced like the chopped cabbage side-dish that a friend of mine once declared only straight people eat. Which means that the other program I belong to, the so-called “beverage program,” which shall remain nameless because the first rule of Fight Club […]
“To James, In Requiem,” the wedding present ditty reads. I open a yellowed envelope and find it tucked in a “Wedding Congratulations” card dated April 10, 1948, signed by twenty-seven people. My father’s coworkers at his engineering firm perhaps? None of the names seem familiar. A lavender orchid decorates the front of the card, with […]
The rabbi hands me the shovel, instructing me to invert its bowl before scooping the first mound of earth onto my father’s grave. This is the custom, he explains. To honor our loved one’s memory, we must demonstrate our reluctance to perform this obligatory task. With an upside-down shovel, the rabbi says, his free hand […]
When I was little, Dad would get into the car and say, “Let’s get lost.” “OK,” I’d shout. “Let’s get lost.” At each intersection he’d ask, “Which way?” until we didn’t know where we were anymore. “Look,” I’d tell Mom when we banged into the breakfast room later. “Dad bought me a diary with a […]
Some years ago—never mind how long precisely “I don’t remember anything that happened to me.” Michael lifts his hands to chest level as if he is about to catch something. He has beautiful hands that make neat stitches on a hem or trace in the air music’s rise and fall. Now they feel the emptiness […]
Toothpaste, toilet paper, hamburger, ketchup, buns. Five items make a Saturday morning grocery list. My wife rehearses the items with me, face-to-face, asking me to repeat the list. It’s the only way she knows I understand her. When she asks if I understand, I always nod my head. I double check my wallet for money, […]
FACT: I am fourteen years old. I already know more than my mother does. She doesn’t drive. She doesn’t work. My mother quit school after eighth grade and went to vocational school. Now she has kids in grade school, junior high, and high school, plus four more at home, three in diapers, cloth diapers. Every […]
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