The Way Fire Talks to Wood
In front of me in line, a man hisses at a woman. I can’t distinguish all of the words, but the words don’t matter; his voice crackles and stings. He talks to her the way fire talks to wood. She stands perfectly still, unflinching. She makes no eye contact, but I see her head sink...
Emergency Room, 1978
Sacked out in the on-call room, I awaken to a strident ring. “You’re the resident on call for ob, right?” a tired voice says through the receiver. “I got a real gusher. Think she’s aborting, but that’s technically still pregnant, so she’s yours.” A bit of the meanness that comes with chronic sleep deprivation remains...
Planet Unflinching
It used to be an axiom that an object cannot occupy two positions at the same time, but now, of course, one may argue that in cyberspace it is possible to do just that. Perhaps someday it will also be possible to occupy the same position at two different times. At the dinner table, there...
Posing Nude
Posing nude isn’t anything like an Anais Nin story, with artists and models haunting the back streets of Paris, living scandalous, sex-frenzied lives. There is nothing titillating about the task. In this makeshift studio, oversized can lights threaten to blind me if I forget to blink. Accumulated sketchbooks and charcoal pencils clutter the mantlepiece. My...
Head-Turner
We’re walking to the Avis outlet on 12th Street when Kat makes me cry. We’ve just had dinner, and she’s asked me to walk with her to pick up her rental for the next day. She has errands to run that require lugging around large objects. Soon she’ll be gone for six months, to start a...
Melting
I am passing the library when I see them. Fourteen men walking down a side street, all dressed alike, all stepping to the same steady rhythm. They wear black brimmed hats with black ribbons; the kind all men used to wear before Jack Kennedy made the bare head appealing. They wear black suits and white...
Growth
What you have heard is true. I had a growth on my chin. To be exact, I had a single, as in solitary, hair growing out of my chin. I had the most robust stab of hair on the right side of my chin, more a thorn upon which someone might impale themselves than a...
When Ellie Ironed
When Ellie ironed it was Tuesdays. Mondays she hung linens perfumed by Clorox on the line to dry. Before she left for home in the evening, she’d spread them across the kitchen table, and sprinkle them to just-damp with water, and wad them up in the plastic sheeting removed from the dry cleaning: bagged mounds...
A Brief History of Sex Education
In the summer of 1979, I was Mark Merlini’s girlfriend for four hours. He lived down the street and suddenly seemed cute, so we kissed for about a half-hour on the hill behind his house, facing the Route 11 bypass in Gilford, New Hampshire. He kissed with his mouth open so of course I opened...
Suburbs, Summer 1972
My mother starts each day with a cigarette from her Tupperware pouch and the radio tuned to the polka station, where fm means fine music, blaring from the kitchen window sill. Through our back yard, sun gleams off of Mr. Swan’s lifetime collection of Air Streamers, where thirty cats, some neighbors say, roam free. Silver...
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