Walk through the giant open jaws of the blue whale, back toward the stunned faces of the china-headed dolls wearing Victorian clothes and clutching real leather purses to find the house that’s the size of a small gas stove. Set on a three-foot platform so you can peer into its windows, point at its tiny…
I find his stash of magazines stacked neatly in a bathroom drawer. Thumbing through them, I scan the stories I know he pours over: liberal conspirators, women who carry firearms, home invaders stopped dead by “armed citizens.” My blood beginning to boil, I realize he’s quit telling me these stories, that the magazines no longer…
Each time I return to this house that doesn’t feel like my house, I enter like a thief or maybe its victim. Pushing on the door with gingerly dread, I listen for alien sounds that whisper turn and run back to wherever you’ve come from, wherever you’ve been. Its tidy, hushed dignity does not dissuade…
Think of the energy we put into this house each day. Scrubbing its sinks, vacuuming the headsful of hair that gather in every corner like tumbleweeds. Consider the coats of brights and neutrals you’ve brushed onto every wall, the doorstoppers and screens you’ve replaced, the bookcases we’ve assembled until our thumbs ached. Think of the…
If you ask me anything about him, and I mean the simplest question about his age or what he likes to do, I’m likely to answer in a complicated way that you are not prepared for. You will judge me, and I will hate you, and we will not be friends. In earshot of the…
(after Henri Cole) How long will it be before I start feeling like this place is our home? Before the strange corners squatting in this house stop gouging my hips. Before our neighbors quit bringing us bread and handwritten notes. Will my new license plate always taunt me with its prescription for love? Everyone says…
I know how this happened. The tradition of naming things one might pass on to loved ones got him thinking about his share.
It’s 4:37 in the morning and I am almost all here. Listening for the heavy sound of the fan kicking on, muffling the thuds of the delivery truck unloading fruit, the rumbling, irregular traffic on Mill Road, the inexplicable banging in the hallway which will probably wake the dog and start him whining again, I…
In the fourth grade Billy Morton calls me a chink and I think at first it’s because he sees my mother sitting quietly in the last row behind all the other mothers on back-to-school night (her black ink hair falling down to her waist like a curtain closed to everyone whenever she bends her head),…