will not really go down in history because it’s not even an age or an era. But it’s an individual one, something bound to be repeated throughout the year. It could be— any day really. When all efforts of third-world resilience are overwhelmed by a […]
While I am a strong advocate of home cooking over dining out, an exception was made when my father suggested Bubbalou’s Bodacious Bar-B-Que for my eighteenth birthday. We must’ve arrived during peak hours considering there were practically zero parking spaces available. After several rounds of […]
7 a.m. One of them stirs underneath the duvet. No matter how cold it is outside the covers, they hop out and onto the hardwood floors to make coffee for the pair. While the water boils for the Chemex glassware, they survey the kitchen: It […]
Collin had eaten candles nearly all of his life. He could remember his mother and father encouraging him to lick chocolate frosting off a candle from his sixth birthday cake, bite into it, and peel the wax from the wick like flesh from a bone. […]
First you have to remember things the way they happened. This is not always easy. Ravens flew past me that day and that’s what I remember first about Josephine. She appeared and so I thought, for a moment, that she came with the ravens. That […]
It sits at an angle, no longer plumb with the sky, at odds with our world. The fence seems sturdy, I went out and prodded it to make sure it’s safe. The squirrels scamper over it with aplomb, accustomed already to its slant. My wife […]
I caught sight of him standing near the nails. My first thought had been the bakery, he always had a leaning toward anything iced, but something told me I might find him in the hardware store, so I went there instead. His gray hair curling […]
CW: abuse What’s Your ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) Score? Take the Quiz On a cool evening in March, did your father stumble across the foyer, grab your mother by her neck, spray her face with hot spit and laugh while she struggled to breathe? Yes/No […]
We learned to smoke in the spring, watching The Big Lebowski, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, or Superbad on nights when the wind whispered through windows, and smoke rose into the air so wide and wondrous. Adulthood was something nascent, a still-forming beauty, something tender and wonderful […]
“I don’t know the scientific names of plants and flowers,” she says. “But I can tell you how to ride the bus from, let’s say, Hunter’s Point to Stonestown Mall.” She breathes in and out three times, but he only stares at her, so she […]
Since we discovered the bottles, I can’t stop counting, and my therapist reassures me, tells me it is anxiety’s way of working through fresh trauma, but all I know is that at night, after I’m done playing mommy and left prostrate on my back staring […]
Elliot’s mother knew he would be a magician only days after he was born. “It’s amazing how he can just make things disappear,” she would joke with neighbors. “Money. Sleep. Poof! Vanished into thin air.” When Elliot was six, she nicknamed him Houdini. “I don’t […]
