The last prison the feds sent me to had been built on the side of a bluff in the middle of the desert. An island in a sea that had dried up around 252 million years ago. Originally, it was an Air Force outpost during the Cold War. However, during my time, it held felons…
The nurse tells me I have ten minutes to eat the radioactive eggs. “You can eat the toast, too, but that’s optional.” Then in thirty minutes, they will take the first scan. She leaves me alone with my paper cup of eggs and a plastic spoon. “Put some salt on them,” my great-grandmother Minerva says….
The youngest, my only sister, quaked in the bunk bed overhead the night the eldest brother left for college. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “The family is breaking up,” she sobbed. A murmuration of starlings floods the sky one late November sunset. Twisting in dark, iridescent waves in midair, hundreds of thousands of birds move in…
I threw myself into the ocean once, off a spit of land on the coast of Maine where the rocks stand up into a low outcropping, and the steady hands of the tide pull the sea away from the shore, out into the bay. As it recedes, the water surges past the shoulders of the…
“You all, who will emerge out of the flood In which we have drowned, Remember When you speak of our weaknesses Also the dark time From which you’ve escaped.” —Bertolt Brecht, “To Future Generations” Translation by Terence Renaud 1. “memento mori” The madness began in the fall of 2000, after General Ariel Sharon swaggered up…
1. “A crack in the walls that ordinarily hem us in.”[1] On September 7, 2017, minutes before midnight, I was alone in a borrowed house when something began to shift: an indeterminate sensation of motion, like lapping waves. I did what I had learned to do as a child, growing up in Kuwait: I looked…
In May 2009, a year after I graduated from college, I found myself in a mangrove swamp thirty miles east of Haikou, the capital city of China’s southernmost province, Hainan Island, standing atop a massive, concrete floodgate. With me were six reporters from a Cantonese television station, the CEO of one of China’s largest telecommunications…
I lived about fifteen years in New York and Los Angeles, and by the time I moved back to rural Ohio, I’d been gone long enough to forget all the stuff I hated: I forgot about the rules for men (there are none) and the rules for women (the men make the rules). I forgot…
In December of 1936, George Orwell, on his way to fight in the Spanish Civil War, stopped in Paris, where he had a chat with Henry Miller. It would be the two writers’ only encounter. Neither was particularly well-known or financially secure at the time. Miller had published Tropic of Cancer two years prior, but…
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