A half-finished crochet blanket lays on the floor, its frayed ends fully submerged in last night’s Pasta Alfredo. My dead pointe shoes (three months overdue for replacement) are half-haphazardly strewn against the cheap faux-leather ottoman I bought on Amazon with a gift card from last […]
Cleaning Soldiers Bleach, toilet cleaner, sanitiser bottles all lined up like defeated soldiers after a gruesome battle. Minute brown stains from the rusted metal gate still adorn my fingertips. I really need to get these stains out. (or off?) The voices whisper. Now they shout. […]
I went to a speed dating event on Tuesday after work. It was a last minute thing. My best friend Astrid got food poisoning from her lunchtime Chipotle burrito, and the $10 ticket was nonrefundable. In return for bringing her $10 worth of Bruce Cost […]
I keep a row of used wine bottles in a crate in the garage, waiting for Transvaal daisies to start wilting. These sunny flowers don’t fall apart, they wilt with a graceful bow, giving the floor the next stalk—I usually cut them mid bow. Today […]
I couldn’t remember if depression was anger turned inward or anger was depression turned outward. Either way it seems to be an issue of orientation. If we could just get things facing the right way it would solve a lot of problems. Not that any […]
You were there, not conscious but in body, when they draped you, intubated and hooked you to a ventilator. Your bladder, catheterized. Your body turned, from back onto stomach. Bolsters placed under your chest, to accommodate the breathing tube. Face lowered onto a horseshoe-shaped pad. […]
On the record Lydia Ruslanova was singing a war song, the wounded bird of her voice trying to fly, quivering, hurt, temporal, employed not as an instrument of beauty but of grief, so that as we sat in Slava’s study—dusk, cognac, The Fall of the […]
She pours more bourbon into her watered down old fashioned, the glass sweating even on as cold a day as today. The neck of the bottle taps the glass, her hand too tired to raise it any higher. She’ll need to buy another bottle, she […]
My son held up his wrist, tapped the empty rectangle where the digital numbers used to blink 12:00 12:00 12:00. I tried to set it once, but Jackson, five, had complained that it never moved. His eyes darted from the afternoon shadow morphing on the […]
The spinning takes hours. We start and don’t stop. The world goes on around us. Around and around us silken fabric swirls. I swell up, into the vortex, a tornado of nothing but sound and swirl. I couldn’t stop even if I wanted. I don’t […]
Life must go on, we all agreed on that. We can’t live in fear. So we decided, yes–the kids would attend their Sunday morning tennis class, and yes–we would meet at the Café Ourcq, like always. But when we got there we didn’t enter, just […]
On our 293rd day at home, I pack a small bag with three pairs of underwear, my jeans, your soft sweatshirt, and I pull on the new $37 DSW boots you bought me for Christmas, tell our kids that I’m going to the store, yell […]
