Thumb-Sucking Girl
Look at me. At me, over here. Look and shake your head all you want. At my uneven bangs, these broken-down shoes, my momma, all us kids, and all our belongings shoved into just one car. Whisper and sigh all you want because I have something better than good clothes and a permanent address. I’ve...
Things That Will Make You Cry in the First Six Weeks of Your Son’s Life
The shape of his mouth when he cries—like a thick rubber band stretched to breaking. The arc of his back as he stiffens away from you, his belly filled with gas. Your hunger for him to be soft and be held. Exhaustion so deep you sleep through a feeding and wake in a pool of...
Bowling
I remember my father with his pot belly, polishing his bowling ball, standing on the lane, taking a deep breath, getting ready to swing his arm back and then forward. I never told my father how beautiful he looked and how grateful I was that when he threw a strike, he always turned around to...
Hochzeit
I remember circles—the swirling cuff of my father’s pant leg, the layered hem of my mother’s skirt. A neighbor lady polkas by, the one who yells so loud at her kids every night when she walks to the barn that we can hear her across the still fields. She has a delicious smile on her...
Genesis
I am sitting in the sanctuary, a few rows from the front, to my left my mom and dad, my little brother Timmy in Mom’s lap and sleeping, to my right my older brother Brad. Brad and I have just received these thin blue books, every kid in the service passed a brand new copy by...
Ed
Summer reminds me, God knows why, of my friend Ed, who is a whole species of man unto himself, the only one of his kind, the very archetype and all possible subsequent permutations of Edness in his own singular person. He is sensible, brilliant, unusually accomplished – he’s a neurosurgeon of great skill, a self-taught...
Split
I could split my heart on the anvil and put her inside…” — Anne Carson My heart, these days, is much too dense to break. It would require a difficult configuration of tools — mallet, wedge, hatchet, and maul — to make this kind of severance possible. It’s tough as those deep knots in the...
Pop Art
In nine years I have been graced with three children and here is what I have learned about them. They are engines of incalculable joy and agonizing despair. They are comedy machines. Their language is their own and the order of their new halting words has never been heard before in the whole history of...
Head-Turner
We’re walking to the Avis outlet on 12th Street when Kat makes me cry. We’ve just had dinner, and she’s asked me to walk with her to pick up her rental for the next day. She has errands to run that require lugging around large objects. Soon she’ll be gone for six months, to start a...
Place
I have been in this place before, in spirit if not in form. Perhaps I have been beneath white pine towers, the lowest limbs high overhead and an interwoven parquet of needles below. Only prickles of remote sunlight penetrate the branches to the ground and, without underbrush, the forest opens to gray vista and silence. ...
Melting
I am passing the library when I see them. Fourteen men walking down a side street, all dressed alike, all stepping to the same steady rhythm. They wear black brimmed hats with black ribbons; the kind all men used to wear before Jack Kennedy made the bare head appealing. They wear black suits and white...
Trespassers
Centipedes crept out of the drains of our old house at night. They materialized suddenly, high on the white walls, reddish and hairy, terrible. The sight of their countless filament legs made my nose and ears itch, and my skin crackle. It was awful to rise in the morning and see one quivering near the...
A Preview of Coming Attractions
I’d hold the strap attached to his ears and mouth, lifting myself onto the leather saddle. One glass eye shone out of the right side of his head; its mouth, once bright-red and smiling, had chipped away to an unpainted put. His nose, too, was bruised, with gashes for nostrils. He had a brown mane...
Her Numbers
First there is the number I found affixed to the sole of her foot one summer night, as she slept, her hair cascading, her face calm in repose, the faraway hollow ringing of a bay buoy in the night air: 75365, printed on a tiny slip of paper. After a moment I realized that it...
The Sudanese Lady and Elvis
Tiny, middle-aged, with black western-styled hair, wearing matching skirt and top from Paris, the Arabic Sudanese woman stared at me. We were at a dinner party in Maadi, an exclusive suburb of Cairo. Employing an Oxford English–plotted, selective, erudite if slow in passing through her lips–she made fun of me. Not of me, of course....
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