Lost
Walking to the Tattered Cover bookstore past the lacy battlements of Denver East High and Pete’s Greek restaurant, I hear a faint scrabbling of plastic on concrete. Not far down an empty side street I see a shaggy figure in an army surplus jacket waving a blind man’s stick and turning uncertainly in the corner...
What If?
for D.P. You had the habit of pulling practical jokes on me that pushed the line of decency: shooting bb’s from your upstairs window like a sniper, wrapping my Jeep in industrial strength plastic wrap five inches thick, putting on a Halloween mask and stealthily breaking into my house and then standing over me with...
750 Words About Cancer
The ceiling creaks with every step. My family moves in clandestine patterns while I type at the computer in my red-room below. The room is red for a reason, not just because I enjoy the color, though I do. The red is for passion, the kind of passion that can take a person to the...
I Just Lately Started Buying Wings
Her voice, like some holy place, issues from a warm brown prayer of a face. She’s going blind. She doesn’t worry about her son’s alcoholism anymore, or the injustice of the everyday. “It’s like lye in the sink and you better not put your hands in it,” she says. She’d know. She’s cleaned a lot...
Holes
I fell so hard and so fast that I didn’t know I had fallen until I started crawling out. — Heidi Skurat Harris, “Buried in Polyester” When the doctor said, “bone marrow biopsy,” my mom and I didn’t make eye contact. My feet stopped tapping on the white, blue, and salmon speckled tiles, my breath...
Crazy Ed
He wore Ace bandages all over his body, but bore no injuries anyone could see. The bandages covered his thin, muscular arms, tanned from the daily mowing of his immaculate lawn. You could hear his self-congratulations houses away after he finished his race down the block. As he reached the finish line, he would wrench...
Audible Frequencies
But I’m not deaf. I hear things, but they are the wrong things. And if I become deaf, what then? Several years ago, we feared my mother, who has had hearing loss since age six, as I have, was going deaf. Her graphs of audible frequencies plummeted to Severe. The next level is Profound, which...
You’ll Love The Way We Fly
I’m in the galley making coffee. I try to look busy, not in the mood to talk or help. This is the fourth leg of a six-leg day, and already I’m tired. I immerse myself in counting and recounting stacks of styrofoam cups, tightening the handles on metal coffee pots, scrubbing the steel galley counter until...
But What About the Babies?
Despite his now wasted muscles, he slides the iron deftly over the old-fashioned, striped pajama shirt he irons on the living room floor. He learned this way as a kid, he confesses, sitting in a chair and bending from the waist. He always did his sisters’ dresses, and still loves to iron. At first glance,...
Curvature
My big sister grew up unable to dance because of the scoliosis, because of the Milwaukee brace she wore twenty-three hours a day beginning in second grade. So she taught her fingers to dance, fast skinny fingers on piano and trumpet. The living room was her ballroom. The piano by the fireplace obeyed. Celia could...
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