This Is Not To Say
So many feelings fit between two heartbeats So many objects can be held in our two hands Don’t be surprised we can’t describe the world And just address things tenderly by name. -Zbigniew Herbert This was supposed to be about the dirt that flies up in puffs between bare feet when the bees are buzzing...
WQED, Channel 13: Programming Guide
6:40 a.m. Sesame Street You have finally fallen deeply asleep after getting up to go to the bathroom—for the third time—at 5:00 a.m. Your son approaches silently, pats you on the head. His hand, fingers splayed, fits into your palm. His patting is gentle and inexorable. You stayed up too late reading a New Yorker...
Kathy
When I took Kathy to my meet my parents, Dad got out his boarding-school yearbooks. He’d never done such a thing, shown anyone the elegant 1930s volumes—certainly never to one of my girlfriends. I suppose her work as an educator made his sharing of that lost world relevant, but he also was showing a pretty...
“Icky Papa Died”
I was relieved when my great-grandfather died. I learned of the event more than a year after the fact, simultaneously ingesting the information that he’d passed in Idaho, that he’d been buried in Montana, and that his grave—while next to my great-grandmother’s—was unmarked and expected to remain that way. No one in Idaho wanted him...
Instrumental
30088. I’ve had that number memorized for 38 years. The serial number of a flute manufactured by The Haynes Flute Company. When I put the headjoint into the body, sliding the perfectly tuned and turned tube of silver into the perfectly tuned and turned tube of silver—may it be every one of our good fortunes...
Suspended
The locker room walls were painted puke green and lined like a cage with metal hooks, and red mesh equipment bags hung from the hooks like meat. One of the bags was swinging, and I was swinging in it, and Drew McKinnick slapped at it and did his punching, and the janitor got me down....
Hill Street Blues
My first memory fails me. Brown shag carpet. I am in the living room. My mother is watching the end of Hill Street Blues on a color television. She lights a cigarette. Smoke rises, spiraling toward the ceiling. When her show is over, an orange racecar with a Confederate flag painted over the top jumps...
The Crab in the Stars
I am home alone—sort of. I am almost twelve, and I am unsupervised. My parents have gone shopping. My brother is at a friend’s. It’s just me and my grandparents, who live in an apartment attached to our house. My grandfather is sick. He has been for a year. For a few weeks now he...
Advance. Retreat. Lunge. Recover
Joe steps forward and back, holding his imaginary foil as the instructor barks commands. Joe’s face is a mask of concentration and anxiety, his body tense. For Joe, it is important his moves are just right, important the teacher say to him, “Good job,” at the close of class. Joe is eleven. We have moved...
Catch
As I threw casually, with that lazy effort of a volleyballer warming up, as the football bounced off my son’s hands repeatedly, the thought came to me: Let it be. Only it wasn’t the words themselves, it was the idea to remain silent, to keep my mouth shut, to enjoy the day; it was what...
How Catholic
You’ve seen the movie: white convertible, uncle with slicked black hair, woman with Cleopatra eye shadow and a neckline, poodle instead of child in back. Okay, two poodles, big ones. Peach-colored, smelling of money. Not sprayed peach but given some pill the way pet doctors, even real doctors, dispensed them so freely then, some pill...
On the Farm
Who Oh my god, who is she? I want her for my own. I want her affinity with all those chickens, her lopsided leaning, her house all atilt. I want that tipping chimney and the angle of her neck as she lets one hen push its way into her heart, another pose as a hat....
The Other Nana: A Memoir
I.In her kitchen, two blind Siamese cats jump from one formica counter to another. Every item in the house is kept in exactly the same place, for the cats. The Other Nana turns a key, peels a ham out of a tin, a pink body. “I like ham for Christmas,” she says. I’m used to...
The Widow’s Trailer
Ryan stole twelve Shiners from dad’s stash in the shed. We drank them warm in the ditch behind the park, sitting on skateboards and smoking discarded cigarette butts without fear. We drank them fast, bottle for bottle, playing it cool and suppressing the urge to gag. After four beers Ryan said, “watch this,” and took...
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