Where the Dust Goes
It’s 8 a.m. You’ve dropped the kids at school and you’re on your way home when this crazy blur of squirrel runs onto Allen Drive. You don’t hear a thing. Instead, you feel him. A small bounce of the car, a tiny jolt, and now he’s just a bump under your wheel, his frantic squirrel...
Future Care Instructions for Your Wife with Multiple Sclerosis
When I can no longer grasp the tweezers to pull at the fine, blond blades between my eyebrows, please look closely. Pluck them all—imagine them as the weeds in the garden we never got to, the sumac growing up through the rhododendron. The mole on my left cheek—if you see me run my fingers over...
The Voice of Things
My wife and I moved a short while back from our crowded and lair-like house outside Boston to an abruptly more open and airy place in Amherst. Over a month in, I’m still gaping at new space and different light. The move came after thirty years in the house that most of our lives had...
A Review of David Shields’ The Trouble with Men
David Shields’ The Trouble with Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power is a wide-ranging and sometimes chaotic look at masculinity in our culture, as well as an exploration of his own personal and idiosyncratic experiences as a man. I have to admit that this is not an easy book to read, not because...
American Professionals
When I think of how much I don’t know about infidelity, I think of that summer we all got hot and horny for people outside our marriages, how in love everyone was with the notion of someone with whom they wouldn’t have to really get naked, physically or linguistically, how the sky in my city...
Things People Said: An Essay in Seven Steps
1. But did your husband ride in on a horse? South Indians don’t ride in on horses; that’s North Indian. Was it a big Indian wedding? I mean how many people? I mean how many hundreds? You didn’t wear a white dress? But was it a traditional wedding? Did you wear a midriff-baring outfit? I...
Wednesday, Cracker Barrel Restaurant
Crackertown, my nephew once called this place, which made a kind of toddling sense: town of Cracker, island off the coast of Frontage Road, where time tries its hardest to forget where it’s heading, the past rattling around in gadgets, trinkets, knickknacks, tchotchkes, so many consonants clanging together make something like music in my head...
“Tetanus, You Understand?”
September 2, 1994:Has anyone ever loved you as much as me? October 12, 1995:My possessions thrown into the arms of skeptical moving men, my three tiny dogs snatched and trundled into an apartment with white-painted walls, my mother arrived from North Carolina and sleeping on the floor inside the frame of a mattress-less bed. Fled,...
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...
Her Numbers
First there is the number I found affixed to the sole of her foot one summer night, as she slept, her hair cascading, her face calm in repose, the faraway hollow ringing of a bay buoy in the night air: 75365, printed on a tiny slip of paper. After a moment I realized that it...
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