Palindrome
I snuck into my teacher’s house with L.—she’d never been inside. I lived in the apartment out back, up three flights of rickety stairs. For hours every day, the dalmation, Pal, clanged her chain up and down my stairs, like Igor, some damned thing. At the landing, she’d peer into my window screen, a shadow...
Full Gospel
1. What I see as a child on my way to church with my grandparents: dead barns, CHEW MAIL POUCH TOBACCO faded into the gray wood. Also: Southern Indiana hills, knobs, knolls, ancient ripples where glaciers halted at the Ohio. What I see at my grandparents’ church: an Appalachian diaspora. Millions fled the mountains mid-century...
I Just Lately Started Buying Wings
Her voice, like some holy place, issues from a warm brown prayer of a face. She’s going blind. She doesn’t worry about her son’s alcoholism anymore, or the injustice of the everyday. “It’s like lye in the sink and you better not put your hands in it,” she says. She’d know. She’s cleaned a lot...
Tlacolula
On a flat rooftop in Tlacolula, Mexico, a shepherd dog moves as the shade moves throughout the afternoon and, by this, keeps its own counsel. At other times, the shepherd patrols the perimeter of its world. On market days, for instance, it’s excited by goats herded down the main avenue, and by the man hawking...
Rob Me Again
On a drizzly Sunday evening my first summer in New York City, I was walking in Chelsea when a man rode up beside me on a bike. I really don’t want to bother you, he began, a baleful look in his brown eyes, but this ridiculous thing just happened to me. He explained that the costumes he had designed...
The Visit
We work in silence. I slowly lift one leg, then the other. My mother chooses the more difficult task, and wipes my grandmother’s bottom. I feel shame at my unwillingness to do it. My grandmother’s face is closed to me. She stares into the distance, occasionally wincing at whatever scene is playing in her mind....
Crime Scene Photo
Greenfield, Tennessee, a farm and factory town of twenty-two hundred in the state’s rural northwest corner, has never been more than a place between places, one in a long list of towns to be passed through along kudzu-choked U.S. Highway 45 on the way south to Jackson or Memphis. More than a century ago now...
Daily Constitutionals
I’ve had some lovely walks along the Spokane River trail and in nearby state parks, but on such hikes, a walker must keep constant vigilance over the feet and all that could trip them up: the skateboarders, the rocks and roots and chuck holes. So for my daily constitutionals, I most prefer the quiet side...
Holes
I fell so hard and so fast that I didn’t know I had fallen until I started crawling out. — Heidi Skurat Harris, “Buried in Polyester” When the doctor said, “bone marrow biopsy,” my mom and I didn’t make eye contact. My feet stopped tapping on the white, blue, and salmon speckled tiles, my breath...
Displacement
This is the Oz Museum in Wamego, Kansas. Here you can see the giant Tin Man just inside the front door, rosy cheeks, a smile straight as piano keys. It’s only the top half of him lounging on the floor, the part with a heart stuck like a prize to his left chest. You can...
My Fourth Boyfriend
I visit him for the first time since he was taken away. I take an elevator to the eighteenth floor of Bellevue Hospital and check in at a security station where I’m told to keep my laminated pass visible at all times—so the orderlies won’t make any mistakes. I walk down the hall unescorted. The metal-meshed...
Pocketful of Mumbles
We stepped outside the restaurant onto a tiny concrete landing. Melting snow made a dull pinging sound as it dripped from the roof onto a hollow pipe railing. A little hill of ice was growing on top, and icicles were forming on either side, underneath. It was the first time he suggested we share a...
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