I was on our excuse for a back porch, no one ever put in screens, and it smelled like oranges under my finger nails. Jack lowered himself into the lawn chair next to the old Boy Scout cot I was on, looking up at the rain-stained roof with bits of tar paper peeking...
“The birds are always watching,” Mama used to say. We had a bird cage in nearly every room of the house. The parakeets in the living room seemed more at home than I did. The lovebirds in the kitchen reminded everyone how bonded they were every time you tried to make...
The bruises bloom like purple flowers. Hibiscus perhaps. Hibiscus rosa-sinensis. The marks will fade to a deep blue. Like cineraria. Cineraria senetti. After that, a sickly yellow. Tansy. Tanacetum vulgare. You recite the names in your head, your mouth forming...
I named her Christina. She began as they all did—a greasy secretion that shimmered and then solidified into a milky coat of wax. It reminded me of the hospital where we were only allowed to write with crayons because you couldn’t puncture someone’s larynx with a...
My sister Jane and I make the ideal jigsaw puzzle partnership. She’s more organized than me, the one who categorizes and compartmentalizes, but I have all the patience. Most recently, we tried a 1,000-piece train travel scene. She dutifully separated the pieces into...
“Do you want a bite, Linda?” you call out cheerfully from the living room. You’re settled into your recliner, hunched gleefully over a cinnamon roll. I pause, grip the broom hovering over a pile of debris in the middle of our tiny kitchen floor. I wanted to playfully...
There’s a photo of our father, donning a black suit, standing under a tree, with a mischievous smile and a diamond stud in his left ear. He was at a wedding, at a funeral, at a party, at a business meeting, outside a church, behind a courthouse, in another city, in...
They sit in silence on the farmhouse porch. It’s nothing, he hopes. Earlier as his wife lay sleeping, toes twitching, nightgown transparent from sweat, he’d turned away, denying her protracted slumber meant anything. He brushed teeth, brewed coffee, ignoring his...
There’s a picture from my wedding where my father looks at me with his face all screwed up with concern and his hand scratching his head. Forty years later, on the couch at the dementia ward where he now lives, and I visit, he gives me the same look. This time, I’ve...
I look down at my phone and it says Baba and I realize I haven’t seen him since that time I was at home on the couch reading and my mom was sitting at the dining table on a chair cracking pine nuts one by one, gently placing them in her mouth and slightly biting down...
She wakes to a white-bellied blur, a frantic smudge of a bird looping the motel room. It jerks sideways like something hunting or hunted, bounces off the window and scrabbles at the mirror. Its wings pop so loudly, the sound ricocheting off the pressboard walls, that...
Do not let your children stand in the shopping cart. Do not let them ride in the bottom of the cart, where pigtails or small hands could get trapped in the filthy wheels. And never — never — leave them unattended in the store. You will linger while looking for the...