What Happens When You Drown
A month after your suicide, when I’ve quit fearing a return to routine would mean I never loved you, I restart my daily swims at the university aquatic facility. The facility has two pools. Fitness, eleven-feet deep, where recent high school swim stars flash down cool-water lanes, chlorine-bleached hair tucked under bright swim caps. Leisure,...
Whenever Men Think I’m Smiling
I’m on the elevator alone for one floor before the man gets on. He stands in one corner, staring at his phone. I drink my coffee. At the next floor, two more men get on. They flank me, laughing and talking about some game somewhere. I pull my arms in at my sides, try to...
Two Septembers
1. Blink We forgot to drop off the gas bill until 4 am, but that was just an excuse. Really, we drove out because we wanted to be in the storm. The usual thunderstorm things happened: rain blowing in on us, which was a refreshment at first, then a call to close the car windows;...
Three Angels
I. The first angel arrives dressed in yellow. I can’t stop looking at her face. She rises from the sidewalk at the crest of Sacramento and Buchanan grinning, mouth cracked open, upturned to the sky. She’s around my age, it looks like, which means she is more old than young. Not old enough, however. Never...
The Club from Nowhere
The oil sizzles, a spray of bubbles rippling across the pan, then the flour-coated chicken dropped in, first a thigh, then a leg, a breast, a wing, another leg, the hiss and sputter of crisping, edges ruffling, browning, the juices drawn in as a hand deftly turns and shifts the pieces in a hot pan...
Butchering
I. “Butcher” has nearly disappeared from public use. Customers prefer “meat cutter” because they associate “butcher” with “slaughter” and therefore “cruelty.” My father was not a certified butcher. He learned the trade working with his brother in grocery stores when they were young. My father’s job consisted of cutting steaks and grinding hamburger meat and...
Ten Things You Need to Know About Listicles
1. It’s easy to disparage the listicle, that pseudo-article in the form of a list, that caterer to our tweeting, text-messaging, sound-biting, multitasking culture. Listicles can’t develop an argument, complicate it, revise and refine it. It’s the mode not of cause-and-effect but of oh-and-another-thing. It flouts consequences and elects slogans for presidents. 2. I’m part...
Postcards from My Current Self: Faith Evangelical Church, Summer 1975, Billings, Montana
You walked to the front of the sanctuary to pick up your award—a Snoopy bank. The pastor thanked you for recruiting the most friends to attend Vacation Bible School, a week of stories and songs about Jesus interspersed with games of Red Rover and Duck, Duck, Goose. Which part thrilled you? Was it a) winning...
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...
Numismatic
I was a child once, and had no concern for cash but did, and still do, have a compulsion towards coins. The curve, the jangle, the shine. A coin is kind of magic, how any circle charms the human eye: halo, hollow, sun. We scraped circles on rocks before we could cobble together tools from...
Threeplay: A Real-Life Micro Drama
Characters Me: Divorced Him: Interested Her: Uninterested Act 1 Over tequila shots in my triangle shaped house Her: Zzzzzzz Him: She made a list. People I can sleep with. Me: That’s insane. Me: Am I on it? Waving a lit wand of incense for her altar Her: How’re the kids? Me: How’s your marriage? 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...
My One, My Only
Invariably, at the grocery store where I buy avocados, clementines, and Lucinda’s beloved pork breakfast sausage, some stranger will ask, “Is she your only child?” I wonder what gives us away. Is it the way I narrate our grocery trip, the questions I pose about the ripeness of bananas, Luci’s eighteen-month-old desire to blow...
Dance Me to the End
Four o’clock on a Friday afternoon. My grandmother slumps against the arm of the sofa, eyes half-closed, sinking down, down, down. The tips of her fingers graze the floor, and she moves them about, grasping at some hidden thing she keeps secret. Today is no different. She has just turned ninety. The dementia, the vision...
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...
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