Kara is 14 and over breakfast, Cousin Martha comes up, how she got herself in trouble running around with boys.
“No one’s going to buy the cow if you’re giving the milk away for free,” Kara’s dad tells her, not for the first time, or last.
Kara opens her mouth wide, chewing loudly. She moos in a spot-on cow impression.
Now, I will thread my arms through my raincoat and pull on my galoshes. Heave the rucksack onto my back. There is little I’ll miss in this house I’ve been scrubbing for forty years. I’ll hitchhike into the city. Tighten the straps and follow the crow swooping east, head toward the scent of death and rebirth—of decaying leaves composting into moist earth—
When it was summertime and there was no school, Edmar’s cousin, Roanna, and her cat came from the Philippines to visit like they always did but, this time, to get married to his neighbor. Edmar, however, found this strange, as his cousin loved cats and his neighbor, Jeff, did not. “So what,” his father said at breakfast, swallowing his blood pressure medicine with his coffee…
My boyfriend’s reasons for bringing home the fax machine were unclear. The insurance office where he worked was a curiosity of anachronism; Sergei and his colleagues wore wide collared shirts and polyester pants and saved their work on floppy disks. Their office was located in a former Masonic temple, and everything above the second floor was condemned. I was convinced it was a front for criminal activity.
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