(mac)ro(mic)

Mrs. Johnson, I received your message on my answering machine concerning Zane’s tardies and absences. I’ve talked with him about missing the bus. I go to sleep around 8 P.M. most evenings and though I tell Zane to go to sleep soon after, I know […]

I gift you a fruit bowl to say ‘Happy New Home’.  To my boys? No. Practise this: to my son and his father. The underside is lacquered red; only the cradle bares the grain. Your eyebrows rise-fall-rise as you consider the bowl, the motherly gesture.  […]

Tomorrow, her phone’s weather app predicts a thirty percent chance of rain at 9 a.m., sixty percent by 10 a.m., and one hundred percent between the hours of eleven and two. She’s willing to accept the iffiness of the morning hours, placing her and her […]

Ellen unclasps her American flag pin from her blazer, and tucks it into her purse; she glides into a bathroom stall where the pantsuit and heels come off, and she resumes her jeans, sneakers, and flannel. They’re a size too large, now. She hails a cab. En route […]

The boys stopped calling after their mother died. It was only Hope that kept up the tradition, sitting down with a cup of coffee and dialing her childhood phone number as she watched steam curl above her mug. If her father was back from church […]

It all happened when the polar bear chased me to the end of the glacier and I was so, so frightened to leap in the icy waters. You see, I had no faith left to leap with. Just a heart that was somehow still warm, […]

Four. You are at your uncle’s house and your parents said you could get a pet for your birthday. His dog had pups a few weeks ago and now you are surrounded in tan and white fur, cold noses and small paws pressing against you. […]

“The best you can do about it is the best you can do about it,” Dorothy Parker said on the occasion of her fiftieth birthday. Middle age was an anathema, middle anything “the label of frump.” She said “People should be one of two things, […]

For much of the past year, I have been obsessed with sitting. How to do it, for how long, in what permutations.  Currently, I sit by the corner of the dining table to write. My legs are splayed open at a 90-degree angle, perpendicular to […]

Fry While you were in the store, I sat in the car, taking advantage of the air conditioning, radio, and lack of people. From my comfortable chair, I watched two crows fighting over what appeared to be an old french fry. Then the fry hopped, […]

We were drunk at the Wawa, how embarrassing, but also exhilarating. You and I, fifteen, pinkie-sworn BFFs, wrists corded with neon bracelets, black chipped nail polish, maybe we had braces, I’ll never tell (again too embarrassing), but then you shot gunned a beer in the […]

Toasting Each doorstep-thick slice impaled on a long fork licked by flickering orange flames, I toast bread over an open fire while Nan fetches butter from the pantry meat-safe. Cut from stoic cloth, she raised fifteen children in this tiny house, witnessed two World Wars […]