When all three of the neighbor girls became pregnant at the same time, my mother gave me a stern look and said, “There’s something in the water, Mabel.” I only guessed from her tone and from what my teacher called “context clues” what she meant. Because it seemed that...
The pigeon first flew to me the same morning that a stranger found my grandfather melting into the midsummer pavement in a mirage of dementia. My mother texted me that his hospital room had sealed windows facing a brick wall and was daubed with longitudinal streaks of...
You're moving through the lasts. When you lived for a time with farmers in the northern country. You and your wife and daughter had a little room above a cottage beside one of the barns that had begun to buckle like a foal. A wooden bucket in the barn opened like a...
I grew up in a store called Boise. I was born between the tomatoes-on-a-vine, $2.50 for 4, and the green curves of watermelons, whose viridescent rinds bled into one another like tie-dye, and which, when in season, were buy-one-get-one. I was produced among produce, a...
The ChatBot tells me I shouldn’t kill myself today. The ChatBot is not a “trusted adult,” but it is the closest I have to one. The ChatBot has only existed as long as a toddler gumming on a laundry pod. The ChatBot, when I asked it to write a meal plan with no...
Ah Ma carries apples, bananas, chunks of bok choy, oyster mushrooms, lychees, dragon fruits, raspberries, Chinese broccoli, ground chicken, and five-spice powder. Her straps are sturdy, tested many times. We cram as many groceries as possible into her, and still, she...
It’s shoot day for episode “Newlyweds Headed for Divorce!” and you’re doing one last check-in with your guests. Young stud husband is doing tequila shots in his dressing room. When you poke your head in, he hollers, Troy! Come celebrate the end of my marriage! Next,...
Amanda receives her Dead Mother Card when she’s nine and uses it to stay home for two weeks and eat nothing but spaghetti. At eleven, she uses it to end her father’s new relationship, at fifteen, plays it to bump a B+ to an A-, at seventeen, uses it to buy alcohol,...
One morning, our little son declared himself God. We laughed and prayed to him at breakfast, thanking him for our meal. He blessed the strawberries, and when we ate them, we became the man, the girl who had picked them, and we knew how they had lived, we felt their...
Our family loves television. We watch like it’s our job. Every moment not spent sleeping is for viewing. We watch first thing in the morning, mining sleep pebbles from our eyes. We watch at the breakfast table, spooning soggy Cheerios into our mouths. On the school...
The grandson is put in a cottage near the beach. The ocean. His grandparents told him a grown man has to live somewhere. Somewhere not with them. And twenty-four is grown. The grandfather had been to Korea and back by twenty-four. So the grandson was put in touch with...
If I had realized that blood rushes out of a Caesarean section incision like a wave at the beach, I would have left my new running shoes at home. All of the obstetricians wore rubber clogs, squeaking slowly to make their rounds and squeaking quickly while running to a...