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...] about New Folktale About Myself
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The North
My uncle was driving us north, where the enemy planes hadn’t yet attacked. He took turns drinking from a bottle with the man sitting up front. My parents and I were squeezed in the back. My mother closed her eyes and held me close. My father kept biting his lips. “Drink up,” my uncle said, passing the bottle to my father. My father returned the bottle untouched. Everybody else we knew had already left the city. My uncle was the only person still in town with a car. I didn’t know why we … [Read more...] about The North
Less Than Five Miles from Home
My mother and I were heading north out of Marathon, Florida, in the middle of the night, everything we owned in the back of the car. I was thirteen, and she was driving. We were coming off an overseas bridge when someone screamed from the opposite side of the street. I glanced left for a second—a woman, long black hair, white tank top, she might have had her hands to her mouth, or I might have made that up afterward—before looking back at the road, just in time to see whatever it was we were … [Read more...] about Less Than Five Miles from Home
Karst
He wakes in the landscape of his childhood, the karst. The house is surrounded by stone that dissolves in water, limestone that becomes fissured and hazardous because of its own weakness. The clints are the parts left standing. Grykes are the absences between. It is in the grykes you find life: hart’s tongue fern, butterfly orchid, primrose. Sheltering in the sinkholes. This is a place of constant change. Changing stone. Changing light. As a child, he would go out at morning and all around … [Read more...] about Karst
Appointment
“I’m sorry I’m late,” I said, unwinding my scarf and piling my layers on an empty swivel chair beside the stylist’s station. The crumpled clothes looked shabby in the gleaming, mirrored room, like something you’d find under a bridge. I was wearing pretty much everything I owned. This little jaunt was the first time I’d left the house in weeks, and let me tell you, you could die out there. A band of polar winds high up in the atmosphere held the city hostage, locked in a bitter freeze. I exhaled … [Read more...] about Appointment
Lobsters
Tom’s barrel chest jerked up, then down at regular intervals, following the dictates of the hospital ventilator. Attached to the machine, he seemed all torso, his lower half an afterthought, like the straw-haired Resusci Annies that he’d haul around the high school gym during CPR units. That was long ago, when he was the coach and Helen was the music teacher and they were, improbably perhaps, in love. Fluids skied down IV lines and into his arm. Bruises bloomed at the injection sites. Soft … [Read more...] about Lobsters