Creation Myths
Coyote chases his tail under the street lamp convinced he can catch what he cannot release the footfalls behind him fingers tapping his shoulder his deceased father’s family still whispering his name the one clue they left him one half of himself in the white chiseled letters on the white chiseled marble his own reflection...
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...
A Memoir Takes Its Place: A Conversation with Rebecca McClanahan
In 1998, with a sublet lined up but without jobs, Rebecca McClanahan and her husband left North Carolina and moved to New York City. They were well into middle age. (“Isn’t that backwards?” asked one of McClanahan’s nieces. “Don’t most people go to New York when they’re young?”) Expecting to stay for two years, they...
Backdrop: New Mexico
When I heard the wind, I knew my daughter would not sleep. From the motel window, Taos Mountain hid behind lavender snowfall swinging thick fluff around its muscles like a towel. My daughter bit my areolas with her two bottom teeth. She squealed, happy, when I winced. That day, I counted her wet diapers, stained...
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;...
Main Street Revisited (Minnesota, 1989)
Walleye and sweet corn. Five Star and Pepsi on my father’s breath. That summer Lizzie and I waited tables at the breakfast and chicken joint while Emily, the preacher’s kid, worked the cafe down the street. Pastor Dan wasn’t out of the closet yet. We walked booth to booth with hot coffee for the retired...
Katy Perry Is Crooning and Won’t Stop Just Because I Did
Because this is a small village and people tell other people’s news, I already know when I walk past your mother’s house, and the garage door is flung open wide as if it got stopped mid-scream, and you are lining up the contents on the lawn (an artificial Christmas tree, boards that once belonged to shelves)...
Timberline
Here on the edge of timberline, boulders brace the sky. The slope slips ridge by ridge, rippling toward foothills far below. Forests flock the dark, layered and deepening into the thick of it, fringed with light. We are all emigrants in this wilderness that is not, settled centuries ago as migrations followed straights north and...
Foundation
“That foundation there,” my father said, pointing as he drove, “was once a little bungalow that belonged to a woman named Betsy Williams.” He slowed so I could see the foundation, the cracked rocks hidden among the wild onion and witchweed. A sycamore grew where the living room had been. We were driving through rolling...
Fun for Everyone Involved
I lived with my father in a pink duplex. I slept in a brown velour recliner on a jalousie-windowed porch. My father, Fred, slept in a king-size bed that filled the bedroom, and I never went in that room, it was all mattress. The pink duplex was on a dirt road, MacCleod. Interstate Highway 4...
Another Epic
I have lived in important places, times —Patrick Kavanagh I could tell you everything that happened on Linden Street the year the Berlin Wall fell. That was the year the Hanrahan boy grew his hair to the middle of his back and rode his bike down the block at seven a.m. sharp every school day....
Journey’s End
We, my extended family, lost our bungalows to a storm named Sandy, one knocked on its side off its cement blocks, one vanished, not a board, not a shingle left; it was raptured. We called them bungalows, the Big and the Little. My grandfather, an immigrant from Barbados, built the bungalows in the 1920s. The...
Hans Hofmann’s House
76 Commercial Street, Provincetown At the top of the house, I’m already turning to stone. But silver blazes through all the windows on the bay. How can I not get up? Still, making coffee I think, drink it in the white-curtained gauzy bed, hide away from the many windows on both sides of this room—hide...
During the Farm Show Parade
In the next town over, early in the parade, the recently acquitted drive their red truck slowly, the Ford F-150 as polished as the fire trucks and the horns of the high school band. From both windows they throw Tootsie Rolls and hard candy wrapped in cellophane to scrambling children, then wave like the mayor...
Never Seen the Like
My three brothers, two sisters, and I carried our mother’s coffin into the church on a Monday in April and out to the flower-filled hearse on the Tuesday. We carried her on our shoulders, raised her up. People said they’d never seen the like, women carrying a coffin. Dad, he said, it made him proud....
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