Those black Vans clop, clop, clopped when I walked. They swallowed my small feet because they were meant for a man and I hadn’t gotten the sizing conversion right, but rather than returning them, I hung onto them, thinking they’d magically fit me, or at […]
Tennessee Moon (Pie) The last remnants of our sky is fluttered with snow. It’s real snow, the kind that piles in our hair like the petals of a flowering Dogwood. The two of us find shelter in the MoonPie store and browse through all […]
“Only babies believe in Santa,” Lloyd taunted during recess a week before my seventh birthday. “It’s your parents, stupid!” “I know that,” I shot back and rolled my eyes. Heart pounding, I turned from our game of hopscotch and scurried to the school bathroom. I […]
This time, in maroon I never remember looking into the mirror as a child. I can remember the mirror so well, the bathroom and the smell of our wood stove and the burgundy tinted air from the wood walls. The frame, still there in […]
You sit at the dining table with my father. You like him more than you like me. I ask if you want to go for a walk, or drink, or lay in the desert sun and kiss and you say nothing, just sit at the […]
Ella runs her fingers through Mother’s party dress, the lavender one with the puffed sleeves and ruffles around the neck. She keeps it in the back of her closet, in a place where Dad can’t see. He’d tell godawful stories about how Mother was the […]
The tree was the last of it, left up into March until right before her birthday because neither of us could bear to see it go, as if it wasn’t real as long as the tree stood proudly in the corner, its boughs aching and […]
The sun warmed my skin as I stood still, waiting, listening for the crunch slide, crunch slide of his steps on the gravel driveway. It would become my cicada song, sending my heart into dysrhythmic palpitations, stealing breath each time. He walked to me, crunching, […]
It had been years since Maury had ridden on a train, and now with the momentum beneath his feet thrusting him toward the terminal, he laid his head back against the seat and remembered something his father used to say whenever he pulled the station […]
In the driveway the care assistant waits patiently in her small blue car as Don makes his final visit to what had been his home for over forty years of happy married life and afterwards to several solitary years. Just soldiering on. He recalls his jolly […]
A girl my age died our senior year; kidnapped, raped, murdered, mutilated, her body in a bag left in a shed. I didn’t know her. I remember reading the newspaper (we still did that then) and seeing two photos. The first was her, poised and […]
1908, Ellis Island, New York I fidget in a line formed by women and children. My forehead drips with perspiration from climbing several steps up to this enormous hall; my ears brim with snatches of conversations. I smooth my circle skirt decorated with floral […]
