Fish
1. The fish jumped a ladder built of electricity and concrete. Swimming up the Columbia is a lesson in progress. Even before the dam, the waterfalls would have battered her forefathers. The rocks would have packed a wallop, broken the skin, bruised the flesh. Now the flesh starts bruised, already whaled on by 40-pounds-per-inch spray...
Orbit
Miss Ranney’s stockings were always straight. I checked the seams each morning as we stood facing the chalkboard, my hand across a place I called a pocket but she called your heart, and I pledged allegiance to a flag no bigger than my brother’s diaper flapping on the line. We sang of mountains and amber...
Bulldog
The one time I saw the dog—I was eleven and had just met Mark—she had nearly hanged herself, in her maniacal aggression, from a stout oak tree. Mark and I stood outside of the chain-link fence, in his father’s narrow side-yard, watching. The grass was winter-brown; it crunched under our shoes. A jet from the...
Chop Suey
My mother was a champion bowler in Thailand. This was not what I knew of her. I knew only her expectations of me to be the perfect Thai boy. I knew her distaste for blonde American women she feared would seduce her son. I knew her distrust of the world she found herself in, a...
Beginnings
Late October, 1969. I’m three years old. We’re driving at night on a country road outside Culpeper, Virginia, to visit my recently widowed grandmother. No moon or lights. We have only the reach of the high beams to see by. I sit between my parents in the front seat. My mother is six months pregnant...
Across the Street and a World Apart
She sauntered down the street mid-morning in a navy blue silk bathrobe, her satin mules clicking the sidewalk with two-inch kitten heels. Her right hand clasped a leather leash, her tuxedo-clad Boston terrier named Boots straining at the other end, his nose pushed in, self-confident and spoiled. The same hand that grasped the leash held...
Winter Count, 1964
When Sherri Luna rammed Jerry Kruger’s crew cut head into the handball court wall at Kester Avenue Elementary School on February 15, 1964, I knew she loved him, a swirling, butch, embarrassed sort of love that denied itself even as it was expressed. She loved him the way a 9-year-old, beefy-ankled, white-socked, scuffed-up saddle-shoed, Valley...
Singing Like Yma Sumac
Standing on a termite mound, face-to-trunk with an elephant, I place the flat of my hand against Morula’s fluttering forehead, a forehead as cool and rough as tree bark. She’s burbling, a contented rumble that has the sound of water gurgling in a drainpipe, but she is also making sounds that I cannot hear, yet...
Mina
Some family members said I gave her the name because I could not pronounce grandmother. Others contended the name originated because she talked like a Mynah bird–her name was pronounced the same way. Mina taught me to play Scrabble: how to hit triple letters with a “j” or “x,” how to stretch to make a...
A Hot Bath in April
This cold snap in late spring has brought much needed rain, and it has given me back my morning ritual. All winter, I rose early and drew a scalding bath first thing, smothering toast with apricot jam while water drummed in the tub. When the weather warmed then turned hot, I began sleeping beneath a...
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