Boot
Last night, I checked into this hotel at 3 a.m. after checking out of the other hotel in Albuquerque where a spry cockroach jumped—flying, really—from underneath the pillow to the bedside table during my routine bed bug check. I’d talked my way out of my Hotwire booking standing in the bathroom while I also noticed...
The Once Wife
BERLIN is still one city in the early morning hours of August 13, 1961, just before hastily installed barbed wire slices it in two. If there is no before and no after, then what remains? Me. Here. Bookending the last seat in a row of five chairs placed at the front of a funeral home....
Spoiler
Endings to be useful must be inconclusive. —Samuel R. Delaney, The Straits of Messina I In the documentary short The Lion’s Mouth, Scottish actress and director Marianna Palka decides to get tested for Huntington’s disease. The condition runs in her family; it doesn’t walk. Doctors describe the disease as akin to having Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and...
Seven Women
We are in our twenties, thirties, forties. Our Pantones are honey, brown, sand, cream, pink. We have children. We have stepchildren. We have no children. We are frightened that if we have children they will rip us open, and we will hate them. We are in open relationships. We are in guarded relationships. We are...
The Base Note
Every voice sounds a chord. Every voice has notes and layers, the way fragrances do: the top note, the one you notice first, is light, citrus; the middle note, the heart, is resonant like cinnamon, jasmine; and the base note leaves the lasting impression, a weighted blanket of sandalwood and vanilla. I experience my husband’s...
How Daylight Saving Ends
You died, my son exhales, a week before his fifth birthday and an hour before the clocks turn back, because a man in New Zealand wanted more sunshine—not time to be with his children, but to go bug-hunting after work. You keep dying, he repeats, every time I close my eyes. And he’s crying. Not...
Agostino Road
I am sitting now on the warm sidewalk in front of our brown duplex surrounded by spikey balls dropped from the tree my mother calls our Liquidambar. My tree feels alive like a grandmother as it trembles its soft leafy hands, hands that shield my sidewalk from the hot sun. My memory begins here when...
Games
My dad carries a trophy over the threshold and into our living room—a glinting gold whirly bug gleaming between two pillars. It shines the way I want to shine in his arms. My older sister and I inspect the inscription on the little plaque: 1985 Las Vegas Whirlyball Champion. Mom holds her wooden spoon in...
After the Appointment
I’ve dumped nearly everything from my car’s glove box—registration, flashlight, crusty hair ties—while I paw around for a tool to open a bottle of wine. This bottle of wine, the first screwtop I spotted in 7-11 and purchased in a rush. My hands aren’t strong enough for the feeble job of unscrewing (as if...
Why I Bought an Inflatable Hot Tub from Walmart on Black Friday During a Pandemic
Because my mother was tired of peeing her pants at Super Value Grocery Store. Because someone told her about an amazing same-day surgery that would fix everything. Because it was a miracle cure! Because the docs said they’d hoist her sorry leaky bladder up onto a miracle mini mesh “hammock.” Because they promised it...
Notice
“Notice,” my yoga teacher coos. I open one eye to notice that on the Zoom screen, he’s sitting upright. Sukhasana. I settle myself in the same posture on my yoga mat in my living room, legs crossed, spine straight. “Notice your grieving,” he says, his voice small through the laptop speaker. Yes, I think....
At Sea
He holds the rock in his hand, size of a grapefruit, color of an orange if the orange had been scuffed with sand. Rough and bumpy, surface flaking with dried mud, it glitters in the sun, and I think how when I was a boy I might’ve been scared, the idea of my dad...
What It’s Not
She said, “Draw what startles you awake.” I held my good pen in my non-dominant hand and drew a jagged circle, almost like barbed wire. Still, I tried for symmetry as I do in all things. All things? Yes, or at least compositional balance and complimentary colors. If I could dress myself with the...
Buoy
When the radio crackles on, I remember my skin. The practiced, silken voice of NPR‘s Krista Tippet lifts above the sizzle of pancakes and the shuffle of feet against the hardwood floor. The morning’s topic: “Grappling with Whiteness.” Emphasis on the Wh–. I don’t need to look up to remember (god, do I remember)...
When the Uber Driver Asks, Do You Have Any Kids?
and they always ask, the other me doesn’t say no. She doesn’t get the follow-up questions – Do you plan to, later? or, worse, Why not? Other Me doesn’t have to weigh whether to tell a lie, something easy, or to plunge into the sudden intimacy of the truth of life as a disabled...
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