An Indian in Yoga Class: Finding Imbalance
Sukhasana My intent for the day’s practice: become more Indian. As an Indian from Indiana who has never been to India, I want to get in touch with my roots, and doing yoga seems like a fun way to do that. Ommmmmm As we flutter our eyelids open, Brittany, the instructor, says, “Today we’re going...
Advance Directive to my Future Roommate at a Yet-to-be-Named Care Facility
For it will come to pass at some appointed hour, that you will sense from behind the pulled curtain of the room we share an agitation of the air, a perturbation of the light, and then a trickle of language, soft babbling you might first guess vaguely Pentecostal, until, breaking forth into raucous splendor, my...
The Longest Con
Whenever I’m too in love with somebody, I imagine him in prison—orange jumpsuit, laceless slippers, his days a humiliating routine of following other men’s orders. He’s been convicted of something cowardly, or neglectful. Not murder, but uttering and publishing, maybe, or accidental mail fraud. Something worse than failing to fall in love with me back,...
Punch Line
One night when my wife is pregnant with our second child, she asks me for a glass of water. It’s late, and though it is a minor request, I still grumble as I sleepwalk to the kitchen. Who can say what time it is? Even the clocks are asleep. But the water is there, and...
Fast Food
The snow-white husky under the pew in the foyer is watching the humans at the butcher block table in the middle of the kitchen. The father in the suede suit coat has been back from his job twenty-two minutes and forty-eight seconds, and is eating eleven peanuts cracked open from their shells, three smears of...
Things She Says
about things she said I never said that. You’re making that up. Stop making things up. Stop making things up about me. in praise Stop making that up: No one hates you. Everyone is jealous. Everyone falls in love with you. My gorgeous girl. Lots of men will fall in love with you. You’re...
White Guy
I was in Walmart yesterday, swung around the end of one aisle where a five-foot-high cardboard-display edge stuck out about eight inches and, like an old fuck, caught it with my chest. Back up slightly, proceed on toward the Life Savers. Halfway up the aisle (around the Life Savers) this black guy, twenty-five-ish, slightest smile...
Intro to Creative Writing
Professor Stevens dislikes donuts; the icing gets stuck in his beard. Fridays he breakfasts at Burger King before heading out to the lake, where he smokes cigarettes on the shore and ignores his wife’s phone calls. He idolizes James Dickey. He’s no good at fiction. The Department Chair’s out to get him. He strolls into...
Pheasant
As I heard the story she liked him but she wasn’t sure, so Gideon-like she asked “Lord, give me a sign,” and just to make sure the deity was authentically involved she said “make it a sign with a pheasant.” The next time Mr. X showed up he opened with “I almost hit a pheasant...
Driving William Stafford
The only thing we talked about was bread. How to keep the crust from splitting in the oven’s heat. How to keep the rise from falling. What the kneading did for the hands. It was 3:00 a.m., as dark as early morning gets, and 26º below. I looked it up. At least once per mile,...
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