They come arching over the horizon from distant places, like bent, crooked arrows dispatched from many directions. They arrive in thin blue envelopes on folded stationery, or in fat, feverishly duct-taped packages. By overnight mail—sent prepaid by Fed Ex—($26.00!)—containing, say, three little misshapen onyx pebbles, which, I am told, should be placed in the corner…
Here is the sequence of events from my perspective. I stopped at the stop light, in the right lane. It was early enough in the morning that I did not quite have my wits about me. But that doesn’t matter. I saw a group of five white women, all dressed alike, in tight-fitting black shorts…
A self consists primarily of unremembered events. The highest number of memories forgotten about a particular person will disappear from the mind of that same person. Usually this happens involuntarily, but some people suppress certain memories. Occurrences tangential to the person tend to retain even less staying power. Many of the moments relating to the…
A plane crashed under mysterious circumstances in a country with a dense and sparsely populated rainforest. None of the passengers or crew survived. Because of the nature of the accident, many parts of the plane had scattered over a wide area, which made what would prove a difficult investigation almost impossible. People from nearby villages…
My high-school English teacher Ms. Dachs did three things I remember my senior year: she cried openly in front of the class on September 12, 2001; she introduced us to William Safire’s column “On Language”; and she played a cassette tape of George Carlin’s stand-up bit on euphemisms. That’s all I have of her. (What…
When Julia fell down the basement stairs of Emmaus House and bruised her hip so badly she couldn’t stand, I should have made her congee to help her recover. The dish is easy enough to cook, only slightly more demanding than toast. It falls in the family of comfort-mush including oatmeal, polenta, farina, and grits….
What do you see when you see red? My mind free-associates: the red-light district. Little Red Corvette. Chanel number 99. Van Gogh said that orange is the color of insanity. In The Scarlet Letter, red is the mark of adultery. And then there was the time I was gossiping in the upscale NYC hair salon…
“Success is never so interesting as struggle.” —Willa Cather My sister was like a mother to her boyfriend’s four girls from the age of seventeen until she was twenty-two. Her boyfriend, José, was one of the local drug dealers. He went to the Nebraska State Penitentiary for two years for dealing methamphetamines. When José…
Malcriado Mom pried off a press-on nail and dropped it into her purse. I watched: The bag rattle as our cab flew over another pothole on our way to the airport where we were dropping her off. Mom bragging to the cabdriver about how this was going to be my first time staying in Nicaragua…
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