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….
"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…
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…
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…
Chi Chi inhaled the screen from her crack pipe.” I laugh and wait for Leslie to join in, but there is only silence on the other end of the line. “You’re serious?” I ask. “You better believe I’m serious. That child gone and almost killed herself.” I want to apologize for laughing, thinking this was…
1. I knocked on the picture window of the Marlin Cafe, trying to get the bartender’s attention, so I could get in and have a Sunday morning hangover drink. The Marlin was an old man’s dive on Broadway near Cathedral Parkway, a street that everyone in the neighborhood called 110th Street. Technically, the bar was…
Twenty years old, sparkly makeup on my eyes and cheeks, I wrap a leg over the back of my uncle’s motorcycle, hoist myself onto the cracked vinyl seat. He’s the cool uncle. The uncle who’s fifteen years older than me, who dates a model, who sips tequila from wide-mouthed glasses in Chelsea bars. Who gives…
She’s already fallen twice, first breaking the left hip when she misses a step at the beauty parlor, then her right in a tumble at her old house in Arizona. It’s in this precarious condition that my mother comes back into my life. When her second husband dies, it falls on me, as her only…
Fifty-six years ago I picked up a musical instrument for the first time with intent to commit jazz. It was a trombone left behind by another kid at the jazz record store where we both hung out. (He’d been snatched by Selective Service for the Korean War. I’d 4-F’ed out.) I got a single lesson…
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