Games
My dad carries a trophy over the threshold and into our living room—a glinting gold whirly bug gleaming between two pillars. It shines the way I want to shine in his arms. My older sister and I inspect the inscription on the little plaque: 1985 Las Vegas Whirlyball Champion. Mom holds her wooden spoon in...
Swing
Uncle Dunkel towered above me—six feet of living lath held together by pluck and sinew. I was a chubby, bowlegged toddler when he returned from the war in Korea. Over the next few years, he honed his carpentry skills. He strode along ridgepoles. He built our family a screen porch, shingled its roof like an...
Still Life
“Dale,” the restaurant’s hostess calls from her list, and because it’s been five years I don’t look up. My brother’s dead, and no hostess will raise him or call him forth to claim one last omelet. I’d like to see him cross the foyer of rustling people-filled benches though, have him share in this Sunday...
A Legacy of Falling
In the last few months of her life, when she could no longer get out of bed without falling, my mother told her nighttime caretaker that she had contemplated throwing herself from the subway platform into an oncoming train. The confession didn’t surprise me, just the scenario. I recalled that on a visit to her...
There Will Be Falling
In my dreams, I catch her before she falls, the first fall in her apartment down the road from our house, when I’m a thousand miles away at a residency and have to rush home on the desert freeway, smoking a hundred Kools on the way. The second fall on the sidewalk in front of...
What I Do on My Terrace Is None of Your Business
The woman in the apartment on my left has her head drooped low and an arm weighed down by a yellow watering can spouting all over the clay pots that line the metal bars of her terrace. If she had fuchsia pink hair, she would look exactly like the hibiscus flowers she’s been growing in...
On the Eve of My Mother’s Dying
What hospice people do is coordinate. They coordinate my mother’s move from the hospital where she was taken unresponsive to the assisted living facility where she remains unresponsive. They coordinate the ambulance personnel who transfer her from the stretcher to the hospital bed whose rental and delivery they have also coordinated. They coordinate the schedule...
Using Fiction within Nonfiction to Navigate Difficult Emotional Terrain
My mother was one of the most significant adults in my childhood, as mothers are for many people. Yet when I tried to write about her, my writing fell flat. I was unable to capture her complexity or the complexity of my feelings for her, and she came across as annoying and the narrator (me)...
Salvage
Tommy’s parents wave from the porch as our minivan pulls up. His dad smiles, and that’s when I see he’s missing about half of his teeth. Before retiring a few years back, Gerald had been a mechanic. During high school, he’d apprenticed at his uncle’s garage, then serviced army vehicles while stationed in Germany, then...
Letting It Be
My Papa loves to watch the news. He has a chair, angled so that he and the television can be in a line. He plugs his computer in beside him, his lamp above him, the cords hanging within a hairy arm’s length. I think he feels safe there, huddled among the pictures of my mother...
Writing Trans Characters
When I was in my early twenties in the early part of the aughts, I gravitated towards anything with a transgender character. Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the bizarre zombie flick and Guitar Wolf vehicle Wild Zero, The Kink’s “Lola,” Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild...
Bringing Characters to Life: An Interview with Susan Kushner Resnick
Book Reviews Editor Debbie Hagan interviews Susan Kushner Resnick author of You Saved Me, Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me About Living, Dying, Loving, Fighting and Swearing in Yiddish (Globe Pequot/skirt!, 2012). Resnick has been a writer and journalist for twenty-eight years. Her first book, Sleepless Days: One Woman’s Journey Through Postpartum Depression (St....
Afternoon Affair
On the light rail after work I sit down next to a homeless man sitting next to his black plastic garbage bag stuffed full. He asks me for my name. He is friendly so I give it to him. He is Popeye, he laughs, I am Olive Oyl. He has the sour smell of the...
Incisions
The nurse who preps my mother for surgery is kind. She wears clogs and a smock with balloons and rainbows all over it. Her hair is pulled into a high ponytail. Overhead, the TV is tuned to Good Morning America. The sky over America is popsicle blue. “I like your uniform,” my mother says, her...
Darts
Davy has a scar on her forehead, just off center, as though it marks the edge of a third eye. All this third-grade year she has been telling us her history week by week. She’s been saying that soon she will get to the part where she acquires the scar. It’s Friday and we surround...
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