It’s Only Fair
When the ax falls, we stand perfectly still, as is expected. We don’t close our eyes. We don’t take a step back to avoid the splatter. We stand off to the side, breathing through our mouths, tasting the stench of chicken shit and sweat. We can hear the chimes of the ice cream truck in...
Lamentation for Junior
A few months after my biological brother’s funeral, my father calls to say my stepbrother just got shot and killed by Milwaukee police. They say they tried to pull him over but he sped off, crashed, fled on foot with a gun in hand. You can imagine the rest. When my stepmother takes the phone,...
Jiaozi
Changsha, China, I’m fourteen months old. My life has swiveled on its axis and turned west, towards the United States, a new life and new family. However, before I leave, I get one last dinner. One last farewell. I sit in my highchair, next to my new parents. Curious eyes searching the room for something...
Astonish
Astonish (v.) In 1300, there was a word, astonien, which meant “to stun” or “strike senseless,” which came from the Old French estoner—to stun, daze, deafen, or astound. This came from Latin’s ex- meaning “out” + tonare: to thunder. (See thunder). See thunder, hear lightning, ride air, the wind is your breath, you lift the...
White and Weird
You think it is you who are at fault, you with your round “Buddha belly” and your long “Buddha ears” and your squinty “Buddha eyes.” The kids at school wonder why you can’t be normal. “You’re so weird,” they say. Weird because of your weird Thai lunches of rice and fish sauce and hot dogs...
Tete Draga’s Memorial
My father-in-law in Pittsburgh sent money for Teta Draga’s gravestone at his cousin Nikola’s request, large bills hidden in a small envelope, the way it had to be back then, in communist Yugoslavia. The woman had raised him after his own mother abandoned her bastard child for America and a loveless marriage. She gave him...
Whatcha Gonna Do?
We are wearing our Sunday best because it is a Sunday afternoon and we’ve just come from church and my mother has invited home for lunch a one-armed man named Joe, not because he has one-arm, but because he is new in town and alone and this is what my mother does—she collects people and...
The Facts of Life, Irish and Unabridged
The whole of my sex education—a single sentence—took place during a visit to Aunt Sis’s house. Sis and her husband and two children lived in Queens on a street with lots of space between the houses. We lived in the Bronx, where the alleys between apartment buildings were barely wider than the garbage cans. Sis...
Bad Girl
I want to grow up and be good. I wake up, go to the gym, and eat breakfast, just like I’m supposed to. But I question things more than I should. I count the dresses mother has bought me, their number adding up to the number of things I can’t wait to throw away. I...
Into The Woods
There were three of us—me, Jack, and Heddy—who always played in the woods. We were never inside unless we were in school. We stayed outside until our mothers called us for dinner. We called them our woods but really, they were just a strip of trees between our new subdivision and the only old farm...
Bird Strike
It is a given that my son will be startled and come running when the blackbird hits the window of his bedroom with a forceful, insulated thud, and that following me downstairs, my son will jump and flap and spin on the back porch as I bend to examine the damage; finding a fledgling, stunned....
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...
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...
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...
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....
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