How to Fall in Love For Real
At twenty-two, I fell in love with the sales clerk who helped me pick out clothes at the mall. I was in love with my best friend’s wife. I was in love with everything. The sales clerk’s name was Cricket. She was six months pregnant. And for two weeks at sea, I imagined how I...
Old Habits
Almost midnight at ToyJoy, a funky, noisy, toy store swathed in twinkly lights and geometric neon in Austin, Texas. Leila, Burke, and I wander the aisles, shuffling sideways past other late-night wanderers and finger glow-in-the-dark armadillos, hula girls with cowboy boots and tattoos, oversized spiders that hiss and spit. Two men argue near the front...
Fracking: A Fable
for our grandchildren, with apologies In the past, everything took forever. Rain fell for centuries, and millions of years after that, the ancient Appalachian Basin just west of what is now the East Coast spent even more millennia becoming a sprawling, shallow bowl. And then nothing much happened. Another million years passed. Mountain ranges slowly...
Imagining Foxes
One time, many years ago, when the world and I were young, I spent a day in a tiny cedar forest with my sister and brother. This was in the marshlands of an island the first people there called Paumanok. This little cedar forest was twelve city blocks long by two blocks wide, for a...
First Bath
His shoulders hang low and his back is bowed. His body is forty pounds lighter than it was a few days ago, before the cancer surgery, before the blood loss that caused his mind to empty its memories. His is a body without strength, without vigor, without lust, without intention, without history. A body taken...
Letter to a Future Lover
You were my birthday present; you came to the door—no one else was home; you said “let’s celebrate.” We dropped acid and went to the friend with the nocturnal monkey-like animal and made love for hours. I fell totally, naively in love, so when you took me home in the morning I cried. I thought—but...
The Hard Part of Community College
He rarely did homework on time, but really, the assignments weren’t that great—predictable questions about essays in the textbook, the usual Becoming Someone or Discovering Your Voice. Still, he wrote beautifully. He always apologized for the state of his papers, telling me first that time was tight and then that computer access was limited and...
A Fiction Writer Takes Off Her Shoes
The day was a perfect idea of itself, of what a Saturday afternoon in late spring should be: the sun a buzzing yellow, red barns, white houses, a neat hem of highway skirting the Ohio hills. I should remember what they looked like, what point of sowing-raising-harvest was in motion. Perhaps the earth was a...
There Are Distances Between Us
The interstate highway system in the United States is the largest and most sophisticated in the world. It is named for President Dwight D. Eisenhower. There are two points and between them, a distance between you and me. These two points are connected in ways we will never fully understand but they are connected. You are there...
Tired
I’m tired of the usual—foofy dogs, West End musicals, Edgar Allan Poe. Also leather jackets and the lost middle-aged men who believe that stretching a carcass across their backs brings Hell’s Angels cool. Especially tired of not having one myself. Tired of tragedy ending badly, gullible Hamlet taking the word of a rasping ghost. Tired...
Story Boy
This is sixth grade. We’re in that dim little hallway outside the closet-sized room where they sell popsicles during recess. The big boys are teasing me, but it’s friendly bullying that I don’t mind. They’re asking me leading questions. They just want to get me started. Okay, I’m eleven years old, very hormonal, both smart...
I can’t stop thinking of that New York skirt, turquoise sequins glued onto sea-colored cotton
I bought it on E. 7th St. in a shop that was only open for one day. Kerouac used to live in that building, but he was dead by then. No zippers or buttons, just strips of fabric to tie on either side of the waist. If I had been one to twirl … but...
Becoming a Sanvicenteña: Five Stages
Stage 1: Fear The old highway to San Vicente is nothing more than a dirt road. At the height of the dry season the landscape is leached of color, the road pale as bone. We bump in and out of potholes, my American advisor filling the Peugeot with 400 years of Costa Rican history: the...
Swerve
I’m sorry about that time I ran over a piece of wood in the road. A pound of marijuana in the trunk and a faulty brake light—any minute the cops might have pulled us over, so you were edgy already, and then I ran over that piece of stray lumber without even slowing down. Thunk,...
Sketch
I notice the guy sketching even before I sit down, but it’s not a strategic decision at all. When I have a choice I try to sit facing the eye candy, and this guy’s not even close to handsome. But it’s the only available chair in the coffee shop, so I end up facing the...
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