The encounter I am about to describe took place in October or November of 1990, late at night, during an Amtrak trip from Chicago to Ann Arbor. On that route in those days, it was not uncommon for trains to make unexplained stops miles from the nearest town, then sit for hours. For the most…
We bought a house. Right before the pandemic hit the planet and turned all thoughts of the future into a gooey mess. Would there be one? A future I mean. How smart would it be to sign those closing papers when maybe the entire planet’s population teetered on the brink of going busto? But we…
Paulie showed up the day my mother had her heart attack. He arrived after midnight, all long legs with big feet tucked into sneakers that looked like giant marshmallows, bedhead, and a sneer curling his lips. His mother didn’t bother to come up and thank me for taking him in. She didn’t have space for…
“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to,” my wife says softly with lowered eyes. She is afraid I may change my mind again. “Ellie, dear,” I reassure her, “I do want to come with you.” Her face brightens, and she promptly puts her gloves on. Her fingers fidget with the black satin…
That’s what his profile said. My attraction to it was the latest in a string of developments to alert me that I was getting old. The other big ones lately had been the movement from few enough gray hairs to pluck to too many to count; the affinity for houseplants; the humorless fear of the…
Early mornings, we trudge single file along a snowy footpath, nerves tingling, anticipating our destination: a frozen, arena-size lake in the middle of the woods. The trail is part of Coach Yablonski’s fifty-acre estate, and the only other footprints crisscrossing the snow are from the hooves of deer and elk, paws of mountain lion, scurrying…
Once, we were blameless, we women of Corinth. We watched over our children within our mudbrick walls, teaching the boys to play and the girls to please. We ground the grain in the kitchen till the wheat dust covered our cheeks. We wove the cloth in the workroom, pulling and twisting and winding the soft…
You know my husband. He’s the handsome, forty-something guy who looks curated from the pages of Modern Dad magazine. You’ll spot him outside the currently over-hyped café. He’ll almost spill his thimble of gourmet coffee on his cream-colored loafers, and one single frown line will appear at the corner of his lips. He’ll tug at…
The fridge don’t work. The milk comes out thick; when you shake the jug it sloshes heavy-footed breaking through the gospel of your grandmother’s duplex; her fridge always broke, and you always questioned why like why we gotta refrigerate in the freezer? Like why we gotta unthaw the milk for breakfast? The answer is because,…
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