The Fair Kids
That’s what the teachers called them when they arrived at school every year in early October. Even though they looked worn-out in their faded, frayed clothes, I imagined their lives as worldly, exotic, roving from place to place, delivering three days of carnival razzle-dazzle to small towns like mine. I envied them because they never...
It’s About the Size of a Clenched Fist
You probably don’t remember, but you were with me for my final hangover. You were just three and needed a flu shot. The revelry from the night before hung onto me, smothered me, made each movement a chore as we made our way to the doctor’s office. But I want you to know that although...
Running in Place
In the fourth grade I wanted to be good at the mile. I wanted to be faster than the fastest girl in my class: the girl with the doctor dad and the straight brown hair and tan thin legs. I would never be faster but my football coach dad took me to practice because that’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...
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...
The Crab Story
Nancy would tell me to write about the crab; the crab’s funny, it’s human, it’s real, not like the oxygen or the catheter or the morphine; the ugly accoutrements to death are too predictable, she’d say, no one wants to see that mess; maybe the crab story is the direction to take, the one...
All Hat, No Cattle
All hat no cattle, C says as we drive through Lubbock, Texas. My endometriosis has flared and we’re on our way to Fun Noodle Bar when we pass the boy in the Ray Bans and the fake cowboy hat, his upper lip bristled with a patchy 20-year-old mustache. The boy drives a pick-up truck,...
Balsam
When I overheard my father say the words master baiter, I thought it must be the ultimate fishing lure. I practiced writing this new phrase in a spiral notebook, never once trying to spell bait like ate or eight. My father’s only magazine subscription was for Outdoor Life, and by the time I...
Bus Stop
Bus horns wake you, alone in bed with the kids — you drove up for his conference, you knew he’d be gone all day — last night he said “All of Chicago is your playground,” while you fussed about the room searching for bus fare, your head drowning with worry: ‘What if we don’t...
Decade
I sit on the pool’s edge and watch my daughter swim. She dives underwater then surfaces beside me. “Momma,” she says, “I was trying to see how long I could hold my breath…what it would be like to drown but couldn’t. I popped up for air.” I kiss the top of her swim cap. “Your...
Welcome to the Grotto
We drive to Dickeyville in search of Jesus and find him entombed behind glass. My seven-year-old daughter Ellie marvels at the mystery. Of all the places Jesus might’ve called home, how did he choose a small town somewhere in southwestern Wisconsin? Welcome to the Grotto, a sign reads, Gift Shop in Back. We exit the...
The Reincarnation of the Absent Father
“Oh, hi,” I said, holding my newborn son for the first time. I took in his translucent skin, red fuzz, bright baby blues, and…didn’t recognize him. “Who are you?” It hadn’t been like that with my daughter. She’d had the look of my husband at birth so completely that I could only laugh at her...
A Small Consolation
“Don’t hold your breath, baby. You’ll turn blue,” my mother always said. But my five-year-old daughter inhales. She holds her breath until her skin flushes, her eyes bulge, until I stop clipping her nails. “Okay, okay.” I drop the clippers on the dining room table, zip up her coat, slide the straps of her backpack...
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