1. I jump on my bicycle and keep my head straight when I see the girls a grade ahead of me who have boyfriends at sixteen—like that’s gonna last. They wave. I don’t. I’m heading to Pumpkin Circle to see what’s selling, last week it was crayfish and false hope. I’ll...
The yellow, lazy heat trickles onto the rice patties still humid with promise. It soaks into the straw hat of a young cowherd and pools onto the shoulders of his favorite black ox, named Ox. They’re sauntering to their favorite creek, where Ox can have a drink, and...
My dad mowed the lawn every Saturday morning—weather permitting—for seventy-two years. Vacations were scheduled around it, plans turned down, brunches skipped, because that lawn wasn’t gonna mow itself. When his heart started acting up, and I said maybe he could think...
They spoke with such thick accents that she sometimes couldn’t understand them, her father’s distant parents, but she clearly heard the woman say, “It can’t be yours, not blood-related, not this loud little silly girl,” and so she tried her hardest to be quieter, and...
My uncle showed me a casting from one of his hawks. I asked if it was the same as a pellet, and he said it was, but with hawks you call it a casting. I knew what a pellet was because earlier that year a lady in khakis had come to my classroom and handed out owl...
We walk cautiously along the trail in leaden morning light, here for the spawning salmon and for a change. That’s how she said it on the phone last week, my daughter: I need a big fucking change of scenery. The forest is dank, decayed, ripe with torn-open fish carried...
On our first date, our only date, I lied to you when you asked me about my biggest fear. Sinkholes, I said. My therapist had suggested I cultivate a tangible one, something I could see and avoid rather than my fear of time, which was abstract and ubiquitous enough to...
The teenagers on the subway were giddy as they downed their Starbursts, shrieking and giggling, trading yellows, reds, and oranges. Reeya remembered those days of sugar highs and how they had whispered about who did what or did not do what. And how she and her sister...
I trace a line from the top of her forehead to the tip of her nose, a peachy pink so delicate it has the silken texture of a rose petal at the peak of its bloom. Her tiny lips pucker, and her fingers flex open, revealing a hand in its most miniature form, more doll...
Your best friend, Meg, is scared for you. She wants to accompany you to the lake, but you need to be alone, so you drive there and wander the aspen grove, leaves trembling in the light wind. You touch the smooth, greenish-white bark, the rough, eye-shaped branch...
The uranium bird has been picking seeds from my lawn. It’s easy to tell where it’s been; it leaves behind a trail of brown, wilted grass or shriveled tree leaves. It lives somewhere near the end of the road near the brook, I think. I’ve seen it there when I’ve been...
We were in search of eggs. White ones like the moon, and some as big as newborn puppies in the palm. Biking wasn’t smart because you’d miss the little things hiding in the weeds and bushes, placed out there for us wives to find. It was the daddies of our men who told...