Start at the very beginning. Write what you know. That was the only advice Natalie’s professor offered her when they met yesterday to discuss her term paper. It had been snowing all day long; white showers had piled up, covering every possible surface. Some people […]
When I jerk awake, it’s still dark, my wife deep asleep beside me. I have a terrible stiff neck, and I think I can detect a lingering smell of blood. I had just dreamed that I had been sentenced to death by decapitation for an […]
Mother and I hide in the bathroom. Dad yells outside the window each night. Calls Mother a social criminal. A dreamer. He’ll make me a fighter. Some nights he fires his guns. Never blasts the windows. Just blasts into the air. We’ve been camped out […]
1. Now It’s noon on Sunday. You stand on your front porch, frozen, staring in disbelief at the schoolyard across the street from your house. The entire mangled front end of a car is in the air, its underbelly propped against the chain link fence […]
Rushing through the mall on your lunch hour, you spot Joanie in the food court. How long’s it been? Two years? Three? She looks the same. Well, maybe a little sloppier. She’s got on sweats and a baseball hat, her hair gathered into a messy […]
The area beyond the bridge is said to be haunted: where the fallen red leaves halt at the bank and a short, flat rectangular piece of concrete extends over a rivulet–barely even an arm’s length above water. Teal balustrades cage the bridge in, the posts […]
On hot Sundays, I often think of the Tourist Park in Ste. Anne. Their new concrete pool was a cube punched into the grass and filled to the white-tiled rim, the water mirror bright. With our family bakery twenty miles distant—dark, quiet, and still—Dad would […]
Farmland Reverie In reverie, I escape the moral uncertainty of these times into a place where sweet air satisfies and the spirit of nature presides. Such a place of calm is a remnant of rusticity that called me in my youth to restore a […]
I’ve tried to invent the perfect mother. I should be packing boxes, but it’s exhausting stripping a room of history. Connection. One mother is foul-mouthed, rife with gruff glamour. Smoking cigarettes, with one of those voices like Marlene Dietrich. She’s the kind who doesn’t pronounce […]
On a wall over the dining table hung a large painting, oil on canvas in a gilded frame. The painting showed a young woman in a long white gown and blond braids. She stood on a stage with her mouth open. Behind her stood a […]
“Where were you last night?” We’ve already had this conversation twice this morning. She’s forgotten it again. So I explain one more time. Slowly because she has to read my lips and now her eyes are going, too. “Mom, I was here last night.” It […]
Motherhood didn’t start on a dark and steamy night. Or by accident. Or in the back seat of a car. It started the first month after her husband said yes to a baby. The day the test read positive, she swore she’d only tell him, […]
