Line
It is coming up on five p.m. when you push your way out of the crowded bus and onto the street that will take you to your child’s kindergarten. You must walk the final few hundred yards, a trip of less than ten minutes for a woman of good health in her mid-thirties. As you...
White Memory & The Psychic Sherpa
Oftentimes, in an alcoholic or abusive family, there is one member who first acknowledges the problem, who remembers the painful and harmful acts of the past and the damage caused by those actions, who chooses to break the zones of silence the family enforces about their past, who points to the craziness and denial at...
Not Nothing
My mother tells a story from when she was pregnant with me. The early eighties. My father came home in the small hours of the morning from the bar—the one he both owned and drank at two blocks from our house—after my mother was long in bed. Common when he drank, my father couldn’t go...
How to Do Nothing
Choose a nice day. Or not, rain will do as well. Doing nothing is not meditation. You are not emptying your mind, you are letting it wander around from one thing to another while you sit still. Some people think of monkey mind as something to be conquered, or corralled, or even obliterated, but there...
Remember?
Slow processing speed. Major deficits in executive functioning and short-term memory. Normal left and right hippocampal volume with low left and right hippocampal occupancy. * Here is the translation: His broken handwriting, his stricken face, his blank or puzzled or fearful eyes. Doors and drawers standing open, lights left on wherever he goes. Two lamps...
But Whyyy?
Me, forty-one, walking with Theo, four, and we are in the totally age-appropriate rut of why, and but whyyy, and I am not at all annoyed, just enjoying the moment because he is, barring a medical miracle, my last progeny, and he will never be four again and one really can’t bank on grandkids because...
My Father Reads a Poem to Me
and on the recording, in the space between where he stops reading in Taiwanese and I thank him in English, you may hear a respectful pause. You may be reminded of the way audience members leave a little space between a play, or an orchestra’s, closing phrase and applause; you may think you hear me...
The Empress, Reversed
Fuck Mary. Fuck Lily Potter. Give me Sethe. Give me Mrs. Coulter. Give me Procne. Demeter, even, give me Demeter turning the world to rot, or Juno burning up every other woman in her path, every other baby, leaving her own children to plot and riot and tear at each other with their teeth. Give...
Night Patrol
“Don’t sleep,” he says. My father’s right arm, a steel rail, reaches across my chest to crank the passenger window down. Darkness floods the cab of the old pickup truck, cold needles of December air, smells of creosote and snow. We are driving the dark roads of the Mojave, looking for my stepmother. “10-4 on...
True Crime
I tilted my head towards the hushed conversations, the tulle of my dress sticking to my skin. I was on a bus headed to my college’s spring formal when I overheard rumors about a murdered student. It’s Clare, voices whispered. Oh my god, it’s Clare. I didn’t know anyone named Clare, but all around me,...
Twenty Minutes
Before I forget and too much time passes and the shape of the moment withers or disintegrates, or rests in the dull shadows of my brain, weakened in the space of night, only to show itself in the final days when I will remember everything before the nothing. Before I let myself think it was...
The Boy Who Drew Cats
Outside there is a pandemic and I am in lockdown in Montevideo, Uruguay, far from my daughter and son also locked down, but in Kanazawa, in Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan, and I am inside drawing, drawing, drawing, filling sheets of paper, pages drifting to the floor, as if I were the boy in the Japanese fable...
Death Sentence
I caught head lice in a kindergarten epidemic that had the school nurse knocking on Miz Goforth’s trailer door to check our class with her portable magnifying lamp every day for a month, and though I don’t remember much from my childhood, I easily recall the feel of that spindly plastic comb on my skin...
Jewel
I. Tasha’s father sits in his recliner watching TV. Wonder Woman is his favorite, or at least, he pays special attention when actress Lynda Carter is on the screen whooping Nazi’s asses. Outfitted in star-studded panties and a gold foil bra, Lynda Carter is impossibly spangled compared to the women on our street. I’m scanning...
To Disappear & To Find
The flat of Ohio spreads in subtle swales before us, the sun melting over the cornfields. That’s what my son likes to say: the sun is melting. He sits in his car seat, face lit up in morning light. He is three, and five days out of the week, we make the hour commute to...
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