On the highway at night, every other car is filled with ghosts. (you could be a ghost, too, if you tried) They flicker in and out of view under the highway lights, the headlights of other cars. Children asleep in the backseat who sit up to look at you. Or they stay in...
That morning Judy brought a television to the bakery, one of those little tube driven units. It must have been twenty years old. Back then, portable meant eighteen pounds. We plugged it in next to the coffee maker, pulled the antenna to length, and looked into...
If I could, I would pray, but God has no use for a girl like me. “Non mi tange.” During labor, my mother had an auditory hallucination that Dante was speaking to her. Dante the poet. He told her to name me Beatrice. Beatrice was not affected by the flames and misery...
He left his scent behind. It melted into pillows, sheets, and shirts crumpled onto the floor. It even soaked into my skin. Once, I swore, it had made a home in the deepest caverns of my nasal cavity, and that’s where it lived for days. When it finally packed up and...
The Lifeline operator refuses to take my call when she realises I’m already dead. I tell her my name, and she looks up my file. She sounds angry, tells me to hang up, says she’s in the business of helping the living. I beg her to stay on the line, tell her it’s not...
We’re having a late lunch, five women, widows now, who have been meeting once a month for forty years. “Dress-up time” we call it because when you are our ages—86, 87, 91, and 93-- few events encourage one to don a cape, drape a rope of pearls around a neck, or apply...
On the line, I run a double-forklift. It’s a lot like a regular forklift, but the forks both spread out on either side and when they fan out, you have to catch the grooves of both pallets just so at the same time. And you have to do it FAST. Also, the balance point is...
I stand at the kitchen window, calculating the parabolic arc a murmuration of birds makes against the ridge of conifers. He coalesces at my elbow, tipping his moon-face up to me, to the scratch of blue sky beyond the box of this house. No longer a boy-shaped smudge or...
It was supposed to be chess club, but instead, it was Gambler’s Anonymous, and that’s what you get in Moline. That’s what you get in church basements. It might be fried chicken, or it might be stale donuts, and I should have left right then, but I didn’t. I stayed. I...
In science class, Margot teaches them about the magic of snow. “Evaporation, condensation, deposition,” she says. On the whiteboard she draws shapes connected by wiggly arrows. She’s tall and wiry, spine curved from decades of bending over small desks. Her face...
When I go in, the sink is bursting with unwashed dishes coated with moldy leftover scraps, half-filled glasses, cups that balance precariously on the counter rim, ripped open TV dinner boxes thrown on top; there isn't room for me to set aside the cleaned dishes....
Marvin’s tumor is the size of an unshelled walnut. His doctor, who wears bile-colored Crocs, has told Marvin and Marvin’s wife, Cathy, that he plans on removing the tumor with a knife that’s not really a knife but a beam of light. When the surgery was first explained,...