1846 My sisters loved my father and always came to his defense. They said he was brilliant and that much was true. He was generous with his family when it came to material goods, and my sisters never went without, at least until he lost everything we had. He was a notable man named John…
As sunlight or darkness fits itself around lamp, table, or mountain, silence stitches itself around hopes, thoughts, and words. Some hear it the sound of their own speech coming back from when they are dead. Some find it summer-cool pillow, winter wool coat. Some tack their names on its door and step inside. And if…
We pretended to know nothing about it. I withdrew to my childhood training: stay out of swampy undergrowth, choked edges.? This was around the time we were too cruel to kill the mice we caught, leaving them in the Have-a-Heart trap? under the sun-burning bramble of rugosa.? But moving up the trail, we caught a…
They had started out too late. This is what she tells herself as she sits in the dark on the old screened porch and drinks a glass of wine. Terrible wine—white, at least a week old, at room temperature. It had been sitting, recorked, in the box of last-minute things they’d brought up with them…
In a kitchen where mushrooms were washed, the mushroom scent lingers. As the sea must keep for a long time the scent of the whale. As a person who’s once loved completely, a country once conquered, does not release that stunned knowledge. They must want to be found, those strange-shaped, rising morels, clownish puffballs. Lichens…
My friends who were and aren’t dead are coming back to say hello. There’s a wall that they write things on.? They have status updates. What are you doing right now? For the most part, they seem successful. They have children, which I can only imagine. The hairy kid we called Aper, I haven’t heard?…
Year after year, rain enters your diary, as the Japanese say, and an exhaustive sadness prevails. And then suddenly one day, you find the love of your life. Happenstance or blind luck; what does it matter, as long as two people meet and life is lived more intensely for all that. Because nothing brings such…
I am on my knees again, mop without stick, over old fir trees turned into flooring. A thought stood once in the middle, near the cookstove, left heel and right heel. Left hand and right hand, I wash around it. Thought without handle, thought without hands, without lemons or Serengeti. One breath, another, one corner…
He managed the walk to Main Street, three blocks, two long avenues, and didn’t worry about how he looked—a big whitehead poking along the sidewalk. Things were getting better, not that Tiny knew the absolute right moment to leave his house, because out the back door his garden merged with theirs, and the neighbors might…
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