(mac)ro(mic)

Whatever it was that happened during the time it took Lyle and Dwight to make it down the three flights of stairs from my apartment, they were full-on fighting by the time they hit the street below. I’d stuck my head out the window to […]

In a time of death and great anxiety, we look to the tree and its unfurling leaves, or to the climbing pea and its orchid-like flower at the end of a tendril. One day, at last, its pods are fat and translucent, and my son […]

This year’s donation came two days before Christmas – a single large box with a red bow on top. Usually the gifts weren’t right for Dina, since they mostly included toys for younger kids. Dina was 12 and past the age most people pictured when […]

They packed up and shipped out and left us to watch the house. Mail, recycling, dusting. Bring in the papers, take down the Christmas lights. Throw the coffee grounds on the plants, won’t you? We hadn’t had two weeks together in the same place — […]

CONTENT WARNING: implications of sexual assault and domestic violence   The bar is loud and hot, too small to hold all these people as is always the case with dingy New York bars, but this is where Mark wanted to have his birthday and so […]

Every year, starting when I was nine, I went trick-or-treating at my mother’s house. Her name was Nancy. I looked up her address in Dad’s directory. He hid it in his file cabinet. I didn’t know why she’d left when I was six, why she […]

I have a photo of my son taken when he was about two years old, smiling as he walked through the wet grass outside the hospital where we’d gone to visit his great-grandmother who was recovering from a serious illness. My boy was too rambunctious […]

The block association welcomed the new neighbors by throwing a pipe bomb through their window. In the suburban tract housing development, created decades before for newly minted veterans in search of the American Dream, every house was identical. This meant the attackers strategically tossed the […]

John, James, Mary, and Martha were inseparable, tied together since birth. They’d lived on the same cul-de-sac, gone to the same elementary school, and grew up being called each other’s names. Every day during summer vacation, they marched out the back gate of Mary’s house, […]

It was the first time he’d been to my apartment, and the suspense boiled hot in my guts. Would we laugh? Would we fight? Our fights could level cities, and we hadn’t even kissed yet. We dodged someone waiting for the elevator and headed for […]

There are few passengers on the 73 late morning, so I take a set of two empty seats. One for Juliet. Three rows behind me, a woman wearing a bottle green flat cap is talking loudly on her cell phone in a language I don’t […]

His job was to peel and quarter the fallen apples from the lawn, take the sun-bathed laundry off the line, and place a little crate beside the hammock so she would have someplace sturdy to rest her glass. Her job, though sometimes protested, was to […]