When Lyle Arnolds is seven, his parents drive to pick up Sara, who is eight—they are going to the state fair in Des Moines, Iowa. It is summer, and the sun hurts. The month has been full of storms. Lyle doesn’t know this will be his last anchored memory of Sara Morales as a young child. A year later, she will move to Kansas. Other memories float: he and Sara chase shadows along the Iowa River, unless it is Lake MacBride; it is March or it is April. That afternoon at the fair is certain. It is … [Read more...] about Portrait of Sara in Winter
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Nine’s Lives
She’d been an ungainly, ostracized ten-year-old, but by her early thirties, Nine had ripened into a chiseled, radical artist. Then the pandemic hit and she reverted to the mean. This was how she felt at forty-two in Oakland, California. Even her facial features seemed fatter and flatter, as though a truck convoy had passed over her while she lay on her back staring at the moon. Nine had enrolled in her first sculpture class in college. Her name had been Nora then, back when she’d read … [Read more...] about Nine’s Lives
My History of Food
Tomorrow is our birthday. We spend the evening on my brother’s phone, reminding our parents about our earlier birthdays. They WeChat us from their apartment in Beijing, a light-filled structure of imitation marble, with a housemaid clattering about in their kitchen. Tell your mother about the first one, our father says. The first one after we moved to the States, we assume—oh College Station and your grasshoppers and Cracker Barrels and inflatable pools sagging on your front lawns. “Tell her … [Read more...] about My History of Food
Blizzard
Some lady had tried to bring a live chicken on the bus, which caused a bit of a stir. The snow pelted down and we felt badly for her. She was all alone, without husband or child to help. Already her dark silhouette was dotted white. If no one came to her aid, the snow threatened to disappear her entirely. In the folds of her coat, the chicken flapped madly, scattering snow, unable to wrest free of her woolen arm. It was a little crazy. The bus driver must’ve thought so too, because he had left … [Read more...] about Blizzard
Bigfoot Catches a Show
I first met Lucy Harrison at an artist residency fifteen years ago, when I still fashioned myself a poet, and, suffering from a newly broken heart, spent most of my month there memorizing the saddest poems I could bring myself to find in the residency’s extensive collection of very sad poems. Ultimately, this had the effect of convincing me I would never be quite a great poet, and by the time I left behind the New England mansion, I had also left behind poetry, or writing it, anyway. Lucy … [Read more...] about Bigfoot Catches a Show
Young Soldier’s Diary, May 1431, A Knot of Towers That Was a Church Before the War
News traveled quickly in the days we were stationed in Rouen, and word of her military successes and her spiritual calling preceded her by many months; it was as if horses ran faster, and people wrote and spoke more clearly then, aided somehow from above. I believed in such heavenly intervention then, and I still do now. It was our biggest difference, Frémin and I, for Frem was the rare soldier who didn’t believe in God; it was clear he too fought for love, for life, for land, but never for the … [Read more...] about Young Soldier’s Diary, May 1431, A Knot of Towers That Was a Church Before the War