Roll Call
Roster. Name. First, last. Eye color: green. Second seat from the window. The first joke—a startled smile, eyes lifted. My comment on the fourth paragraph of her essay in October; her response. Chapter 7: the day we discussed the horizon and what it might symbolize, whether it’s better to go or to stay. Her fear,...
Lanier Drive
Summers in Atlanta, I almost never wore shoes. I’d go barefoot through the woods or pick my way down the rocky drive to the smooth asphalt on our street named for a poet—Sidney Lanier who praised the rivers coming down from the rocky crags in the mountains northeast of us—and I liked how tough my...
How to Prepare for A Difficult Conversation
Step 1: Choose from the following activities: A) Wash the dishes B) Vacuum the living room carpet C) Rake the backyard Step 2: If in Step 1 you chose “A,” stand at the sink and watch the flotsam of leftover breakfast swirl and gather in the strainer. If you chose “B,” stare into the middle...
Final Affairs
Find all my passwords on a yellow legal pad under my laptop; remember last winter Steph wrote my obituary, read it again before you publish it, make sure it is laugh-out-loud funny and don’t pay to publish it in the local paper but instead blast it on social media; remember to update my blog; call...
A Toddler Boy
Your daddy had a dream, my mother tells me, about a toddler boy. A perfect mix of my eight-years-younger brother Joshua, my parents’ only son, and my sixteen-month-old Lydia, my parents’ only grandchild. The dream-toddler had Joshua’s eyes, Lydia’s cheeks and chin, both babies’ blond curly hair. We’re on the phone—me in Oklahoma, my mother...
Dear Facebook Friends
I thought about taking a picture of my breakfast, then posting it, the subtext being, you know, how fucking cool and healthy I am. I mean, who eats fresh papaya and mango and avocado and banana straight from a fruit stall on Moon Muang Soi 6 in Chiang Mai, Thailand? Yes, I’d add my location,...
I Am Not The One They Found in a Cornfield
It is foggy-wet and cold, a typical gray day in Ohio. I am standing above a rectangle of flat granite, thinking: they’ve put the wrong date. They’ve said Kelly died on September 25th, the day they found her. But I don’t mind. No one wants to hear an examiner’s speculation about such things, and I...
We Are Galaxies, Briefly
The last time I saw the other Ryan we were grown men, sitting in the same church pew where we had been boys, still blood brothers only now not quite believers, listening to the bishop talk about the devil flaying souls in outer darkness, that unimaginative name in Mormon cosmology given to the place for...
Chopping
This baby is sucking the life out of me, my daughter says, and I want to return with Just you wait, but I don’t, because I know how annoying mothers can be, always sounding warnings. Instead, I stand chopping—onions, celery, a breast and a thigh from a chicken—making a thin soup that will pass through...
Carne Santificata
I am happy in this village above the sea, this Anacapri, where my husband and I, retired and tending our bucket list, have come to write and escape the dead of another Idaho winter. It is spring here, first flowers blooming, too early in the season for most tourists. The ritual evening passeggiata brings out...
Good Jew
I only go to one bar mitzvah, and it isn’t my own. I wear a yarmulke for the first and last time. I spend three days learning Yiddish on Duolingo and give up. I’m pretty sure I use the word “spiel” wrong. Sometimes, when the men on the corner ask me if I’m Jewish on...
Boxes
In this holy place, surrounded by portraits of the bearded and long deceased, I go about the familiar rituals. I hand the card with my request to the research librarian, and she walks over and sends a message to those below, in the building’s bowels. There the subterranean workers—it is hard not to imagine them...
Raiment
When my father stopped eating and we all understood it was a matter of time, I drove from Vermont to Boston to see him at the nursing home. He’d suffered a steady decline and lost the ability to care for himself, but his memory and cognitive abilities did not have the savage gaps of Alzheimer’s....
A Stranded Moose
A moose had stranded herself shoulder-deep in the bog last fall, at the southerly end of Long Pond. Of course, a car in the mud is one thing, a foundered moose another. One is a matter of inconvenience, the other of life or death. The animal was helpless, paralyzed. Fish and Game officers came out...
I Know My Body Tried to Save Me
Dirty, Poz, Faggot, G.R.I.D: pseudonyms for the boy I don’t want to be. Gay-related. Gay-related. I don’t want to be gay-related. I don’t want to be human-immunodeficient either. I don’t want to be in this I.D. clinic reading Tiny Beautiful Things, a book of collected advice columns, a bible that replaced my bible, turning random...
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