I Live Alone
According to the US census, more than one-quarter of older adults live alone, one out of five men and one out of three women Nearly half of women over 75 live by themselves. 1. I live alone. Husband dead. No kids. My dog can’t hear anymore. God is the only one left who might...
The Mathematics of Decay
In Tokyo, they measure death in hours. Nako’s began with stomach pains at a wedding reception—her own. The cake hadn’t been cut yet, but something else was already dividing inside her, multiplying with the precision of a cell gone wrong. Three hundred and twelve days from “I do” to “Time of death:” The numbers feel...
Rumpus Room
I’m nine. I stand behind a leather couch in the larger area of the daylight basement everyone calls the rumpus room. It’s Easter Sunday and cool and hazy outside but not enough so that my grandfather will need to ignite the fists of coal already mounded in the grate of the fireplace. Three of my...
Lebanese Eggs
Click here to jump to recipe. Otherwise, notice the tippy milk crates stacked two-high under your five-year-old feet, the white chef’s apron knotted behind your neck, draping down past your shoes, between you and the oven door of the ten-burner stove in your grandfather’s diner, the two flats of eggs, thirty to a flat, ready...
There Will Be Plenty of Time
Your mother won’t forget you right away. There will be plenty of time to prepare logistically and emotionally for this event. You’ll become accustomed to the usual symptoms over the course of months or years: forgetting appointments, tripping over the names of acquaintances, the first missed birthday. When she begins to fumble overlong with her...
Potshots
(after Hanif Abdurraqib) I remember guns were a private thing we only used at camp beginning with the potshots my cousins and I took at empty Miller Lite cans the white cans with the red emblem and the time David yelled at me after I discharged the lever action BB gun across the water because...
Night Owl
He switched the headlights off and urged her up, into the night air. “Go on. Stand up,” he said, pointing at the Toyota’s open moon roof. The car rolled slowly down a country road, somewhere deep in the valley of quakes. Soon enough she would be too old for this. “Really?” the little girl asked,...
Things I’ll Likely Forget
Yesterday, I couldn’t find my passport, not that I needed it, I wasn’t going anywhere, hadn’t gone anywhere in ages, not since my partner and I decided to pack up the house we’d lived in for ten years and move to another (smaller) house, in another (larger) city, with car alarms and sirens and helicopters...
other people’s mothers
I keep a catalogue, a mental inventory. There are mothers who paint portraits of cats dressed as Napoleon Bonaparte and mothers who fall asleep drunk on patterns for XXXL pajama pants, and mothers who mouth “fuck you” to their daughter in the backseat when they get lost in the family car and the daughter is...
The Sea
Against a backdrop of spruce trees at the far end of a small beach, a large boulder squats at the edge of the bay. Its top half is dry and pale. The lower half is damp and dirty-bronze. It’s too big to be jostled by the tides. In the foreground of this photo, dozens of...
The Golden Box
I’m on a miniature riverboat or a Chinese junk, or a wooden houseboat with a paddle wheel. I’m captain and crew. The inlet is crowded with vessels from earlier ages of sea-going vessels: hollowed out canoes, reed boats, a schooner, a pinnace. There’s an old dock and a pier and it’s crowded with vendors hawking...
Reading to Mom
Dad answered and put me on speakerphone, then placed a plastic plate divided into five colored sections in front of mom at their kitchen table and said, it’s Laura, time for your morning medicines; I said, Mom, pick up the biggest oval white pill in the center of the plate and she said, “which one?”...
Things that Burned Right Through Me
Buying baby socks and three onesies and one newborn outfit on the way to the appointment where the fetal doppler told us you were dead, the same newborn outfit I now see in the box on the closet floor every day when I drag out a sweater. My parents driving across five states to stay...
All of It
The Start of It A friend of D’s wife G says there’s been a bad accident. “That’s all I know,” she says, “except that it happened on Rte. 15 and Laurel Road.” She lowers her voice as if she doesn’t want to be overheard. “D is in surgery right now as I’m telling you this....
So Many Tiny Stories
I’ve been hanging around a lot of elderly folks recently, very elderly, and I don’t know what to say to them. I am so much younger. The techs put me on a completely different treadmill way off in the corner (at one point I am actually running), and on totally different resistance settings on the...
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