WANTED: Biological Father
(spare time or full-time)* Single, thirty-something woman seeks biological father. Must be: tall, 6’2’’ or above. A thick head of hair. Funny by accident—a lovable flop. Swedish descent, but English accent preferred. Royal blood a huge plus. Kind and gentle like Bob Ross. Suave, sophisticated, and street smart like Humphrey Bogart. Intellectual in a Carl...
Let the Coconut Be His Head
Step 1: Go see Martha the psychic because the man you fell for doesn’t return your calls. Papa Legba, a stuffed doll, sits on Martha’s mantel waiting for the gifts of bourbon and cigarettes. You sit across from Martha, in front of Papa, at the little round table in her living room. Scarves drape over...
What Happens When You Drown
A month after your suicide, when I’ve quit fearing a return to routine would mean I never loved you, I restart my daily swims at the university aquatic facility. The facility has two pools. Fitness, eleven-feet deep, where recent high school swim stars flash down cool-water lanes, chlorine-bleached hair tucked under bright swim caps. Leisure,...
Threeplay: A Real-Life Micro Drama
Characters Me: Divorced Him: Interested Her: Uninterested Act 1 Over tequila shots in my triangle shaped house Her: Zzzzzzz Him: She made a list. People I can sleep with. Me: That’s insane. Me: Am I on it? Waving a lit wand of incense for her altar Her: How’re the kids? Me: How’s your marriage? Her:...
My One, My Only
Invariably, at the grocery store where I buy avocados, clementines, and Lucinda’s beloved pork breakfast sausage, some stranger will ask, “Is she your only child?” I wonder what gives us away. Is it the way I narrate our grocery trip, the questions I pose about the ripeness of bananas, Luci’s eighteen-month-old desire to blow...
String, Too Short
We are a house of notes. My husband, a night-owl artist, writes to me in the dark of the quiet house as I fall into dreams. I awake to fluorescent sticky squares, legal pads, and junk mail envelopes on which he has jotted doodles and reminders, jokes and nicknames, references to art and news, proclamations...
On the Eve of My Mother’s Dying
What hospice people do is coordinate. They coordinate my mother’s move from the hospital where she was taken unresponsive to the assisted living facility where she remains unresponsive. They coordinate the ambulance personnel who transfer her from the stretcher to the hospital bed whose rental and delivery they have also coordinated. They coordinate the schedule...
Paynes Gray: When Watercolors Become Words
I’d gone and fallen in love with the wrong man. Said my mother. She hadn’t met him yet, but there were facts. He was Salvadoran (not my country), Catholic (not my religion), a subway-tunnel singer (I shouldn’t have mentioned that), an architect who would rather be an artist. (What sensible daughter marries a rather-be artist?)...
Simple
When I was seventeen, I spent a lot of time in another family’s home. We slept on futon mattresses back then, covered in flannel, with thick dark fabric over the windows. The beige carpet was scorched and melted dark where the frying pan of cigarette butts had tipped over to smolder. That summer, I lived...
Twofold
“The world is twofold for man in accordance with his twofold attitude.” — Martin Buber, from I and Thou One thing my grandfather did when he was alive: he wrote commentaries on the Bible. Another thing he did was fall asleep sitting up in a chair. Sometimes these two activities would blur and blend, and,...
Ha Ling
I live away from him, in Canmore, Alberta, a small town at the base of the towering Canadian Rockies and along the shores of the Bow River. My job is to take tourists on vacation in national parks like Banff and Jasper. I cater to the whims of the wealthy. We bike along the Icefields...
Logophobia
One morning I watched—through our ground-level bedroom window—the steps of his work boots, back not thirty minutes after he had left for a new job in town. Fired. I never knew why, and he claimed not to know. He lumbered around unsettled, rewiring our bedroom or checking mystery switches, wrapped in his tool belt, eyebrows...
Good Faith
A house wren is making a nest in the wreath on our front door. When my wife and I want to go out on the porch, we make sure to knock on the inside of the door just in case the wren is there—just a little knock to warn her. We’re only six months married,...
Anniversary Disease
Every day is the anniversary of something. May 26th is the anniversary of my mom pulling out half her hair while giving birth to me. It is also the anniversary of the public hanging of Alse Young, the first person executed for witchcraft in the American colonies. May 27th is the anniversary of my unquenchable...
Gradient
This morning a man jumped his car over a curb and emerged—silent, stoic, a phantom, someone said, he was so ghostlike as he moved—to stab eleven people with a cleaver. The man I love more than any other sat in his Yiddish Literature classroom, one building over from the stabbings, where just a week before...
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