When I crossed the street, according to my mother, I still had to hold someone’s hand. At ten, I would be able to cross streets unhanded. I’d held on to Joseph’s many times before, for many years, but...
This woman he met was the woman he met and however you try, you cannot unmeet.
Then he sat down at the table of a larger man, a man with tattoos but the old kind, before tattoos became dainty and about spiritual life. The man wore tattoos from the time when tattoos meant you lik...
The address label wouldn't come off so I put the ripped electric bill back in its stack by the phone. On top of all the other bills, all the papers that ran the house invisibly
That, she said, is a little closer to how I imagine it works. Whether or not you pray has absolutely nothing to do with the person to your left. It's like saying you shouldn't get the moon in your win...
She was tired these days because she was having job trouble too; her trouble meant she did not know how she could be useful in her life. Dad's job trouble was he had too much to do with his life. Some...
She bops around really energetically but she’s also still. Like she’s moving her torso but her feet don’t move, and then sometimes she’ll take one step, and it feels like a thesis statement. Like it i...
Ponytail girl leaned over and she and the tall boy kissed and it was carcinogen gums and magical.
Pain was no longer a mystery to him, and a man familiar with pain has entered a new kind of freedom.
On the drive home, she sat in the backseat, as she did on occasion. He said it was to protect her from more dangerous car accidents; she liked thinking for a moment that he was her chauffeur, that she...
It seemed to happen in springs, the revealing of things.
I don't think so, I don't agree. The most unbearable thing I think by far, she said, is hope.
I am going to host Thanksgiving myself and instead of a turkey I’m serving a big human butt.
While she cut the mushrooms, she cried more than she had at the grave, the most so far, because she found the saddest thing of all to be the simple truth of her capacity to move on.
We are all, generally, symmetrical: ants, elephants, lions, fish, flowers, leaves. But she was a tree. No one expects a tree to be symmetrical at all.
Sometimes, she said, mostly to herself, I feel I do not know my children... It was a fleeting statement, one I didn't think she'd hold on to; after all, she had birthed us alone, diapered and fed us,...
She thought of how she had never sat and had a long conversation with her father because he, too, refused to talk about himself. Someone else should speak instead, he said. If I don’t speak, it means...
She is walking around the living room naked and
My genes, my love, are rubber bands and rope - make yourself a structure you can live inside.
Mom’s smiles were so full of feeling that people leaned back a little when she greeted them. It was hard to know just how much was being offered.