1. Your father calls you train wreck, as in, HEY, wake up, train wreck, bud, you’re falling asleep—beady, bootblack eyes narrowed on you from the Hemingway chair in the basement. Your mother is memorizing two-letter words, your baby boy squeezing the dog’s fur, and gentle, gentle, your wife is saying, practice gentle on the giraffe. I don’t very well like the taste of rubber, says Paul Hollywood––suaven, yeasty fellow in a collar on TV. Your son likes rubber. Rubber rings––Rings of ... [READ MORE]
NOTEBOOK
Cat’s-Eye
At night I oil the door, whose hinges have been squeaking all year, and in the morning when I open it, they’re quiet. The rest is the same. I don’t wake anyone. The cat follows me into the bathroom. After I sit down, he jumps onto my lap, which is half-fleece, half-skin. Each paw, cold as a child’s nose, lands at a slightly different moment. He circles for a few beats, presses his paws into the tops of my thighs, an action that wakes and soothes me. Within seconds, his paws are warm. They ... [READ MORE]
Ember
American Short Fiction · Ember by Pascha Sotolongo Chuchi marvels at the sparks brightening this darkest night, and I guess they are kind of pretty. You look up, let your eyes water against the cold, and can’t tell the embers from the stars. We don’t have a tree this year, so maybe smoldering flakes of the Brownsburg Public Library are as close to Christmas lights as we’re gonna get. Chuchi tilts his head all the way back, mouth open, and the orangey glow illuminates his features. Little swirls ... [READ MORE]
New Folktale About Myself
I’m sweeping the floors one morning when I notice a gouge in the wood like a fingermark in cake icing. I cover it back up with the rug and resolve to sand it down, but a few days later I see that the hole has widened, deepened. Now I can run two fingers through it. What’s more, it’s soft around the edges, wet to the touch. Hunched over it on my knees, I feel as if I’m intruding on something, the embarrassment of watching an animal give birth, and so I cover it up again, avoid it for days, even ... [READ MORE]
The Invisible String
In our bathroom, there’s a worn 3x5 notecard taped to the mirror that reads, “There’s an invisible string connecting me to you.” When my daughter, Hope, was five, we moved from Northern California to Austin, Texas because I had a new job as Chair of the Creative Writing Department at the community college. This isn’t a small distance to cover with a tiny person, so my husband and I asked his parents to help. They flew from Maryland to collect Hope. We were immensely grateful, but we were also ... [READ MORE]
Swan of the Gods
Back in college, I unwisely took an introduction to astronomy class hoping I’d learn something mystical about the formation of stars, how they came to be named, even what secrets they could tell me about my future. The class, however, was much more interested in teaching us how to quantify the universe. It wanted to transform the time it takes to sigh into a unit and shrink the interstellar medium of planets into something like grams, but grams in terms of planets, as determined by a variety of ... [READ MORE]