In memory of my father, Donald French Williford and his father, Carl Lex Williford November 1998 1. The first time I decided to drive to Dallas after I’d stayed away for too many years, my mother told me on the phone, “I’m so glad you’re coming home, honey, and so’s your father. Would you like…
Translation by Christopher Peacock In some places, hapa is a generic term for dogs. But where I come from, the word hapa refers not to the wild, ferocious Tibetan mastiffs kept by nomads, but to a Pekingese: one of those squat, fluffy, snub-nosed, flat-faced, stout-legged little Chinese dogs that shuffles about the house and the…
On the night before the first day of school, a video was released, and it began to circulate among the parents, teachers, and students of Baldwin Clap Elementary. The video featured Miss Korto, a fourth- and fifth-grade Social Studies teacher, and presented her as a finalist in the National Teacher of the Year Program. Claire…
Of course, they choose the Fourth of July to reenact their childhood, a holiday known for explosions, maimed limbs, trumped-up loyalty. The kids—Abby will never stop calling them that—have grown unduly nostalgic in the past year, mythologizing her mediocre dinners, romanticizing their sporadic vacations, basically whitewashing decades of benign neglect into a family life that…
All week Max thinks about it. At night he falls asleep constructing the narrative and at work he spends the lunch hour in his car manufacturing details. When Sunday night rolls around and Nora has been put to bed and Julia is asleep or reading, he brings the radio station’s stream up on his computer….
I. Hello to You One of her jobs at the Deverells’ was to gather up the letters, after they’d been read by the family and the neighbors whose sons had been mentioned, and file them in the special box. Each envelope smoothed and flattened. Each sheet unfolded, the creases pressed out under a stack of…
He was late to pick me up at the Leonardo da Vinci Airport, my daddy. Back then, in 1998, before the escalation of terror scares, parents were pretty comfortable letting their kids fly by themselves under the care of the airline—at least, my mother was! I was a shivering blub by the time he arrived….
I was born some time in 1972, in a country I’ve never seen and to parents I’ve never known. When I was a few months old, I was left in the care of a stranger who will always remain a shadowy figure of inexplicable love in my imagination. At some point, this stranger handed me…
What you need to understand is this: Skeeter was really very fat. It would be impossible to tell this story without mentioning that fact. She would mention it herself once in a while, although in the past this would usually be in the midst of an altercation with her husband, who was not fat. “You’ve…
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