What shall we call it when we’re sexually starving? I never liked the word "horny"; it’s trivializing and more than a little rhinocerean. Also too front heavy to be used for women. The old-fashioned phrase "on the lurch" sounds rude: monstro-comically (courtesy of The Addams Family) redolent both of lurching forward and being left in…
Bill held the knife. I held the book. "Cut a slit from the deer’s breastbone to the anus, taking care not to puncture the bladder," I read. My fingers stiffened in the wind. Steam rose off the guts as they hit the driveway. The moon shone off the snow. He had me hold a hoof….
"Something’s happened," my father says. There’s been a construction accident. A demolition gone wrong on a lot cattycorner to his apartment in Brooklyn. The crew dug too deeply into the dirt cavity where a house once stood, and into the bordering foundations. The house next door has collapsed. There may have been three people inside….
I was nearing the middle of my life when I became a girl. Up until then I was a woman, work-possessed, abstracted, safe. I wore khaki corduroy trousers weathered down to the gauze weave and a puffy and rather grimy electric-turquoise coat, and I cut my black hair short and blow-dried it perkily aloft. I…
"It is only during times of celebration or mourning that loved ones are together," my father says. "Not like in the old country when everybody lived and worked as a village." He and his siblings have moved further apart and spoken less through the years. On the phone, they tell each other how preoccupied they…
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. —Hebrews 11:1 1. Morphine makes me small, airborne. Like a spider. I rest in a high corner of the ceiling, look down on my body on the white hospital bed. It was just one shot, one needle through my skin….
These are my best days. We’ve ditched class, my boyfriend Paul and I, and are smoking a fat little joint on a stone bench in Rancho San Rafael, the park near his apartment in Reno. The sun is bright and the sky is cloudless and the hills around the city are bald. It’s like I’m…
1991. A summer storm blows up the coast of Delaware, rearranging the tide on Rehoboth Beach. My husband’s parents take our baby daughter inside, into the house they’ve rented for the week, a box of windows resting on stilts. Released from responsibility, from adulthood, the two of us run into the ocean and give ourselves…
In northwestern Montana once, I met a person who changed my mind. This well-published and respected writer had moved to that frontier university town, to teach a four-four load, and to be, I suppose, left the hell alone. The English departments of frontier colleges (I once taught in such a place) are often staffed by…
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