WHALEFALL Lorenza is honest in therapy about everything except the whales. She tells Dr. Adams a purgatory of bland truths: her hands shake, jelly seismic activity, when she walks outside and the world is small and real and people look at her with pupils that dilate...
I wrote tenderness on a sticky note and stuck it on my computer monitor. The next person who wandered by my cubicle, I tried to hug. Their arms flailed like ribbons. I was fired. So that wasn’t it. At home, I made a cake, and my wife made a list: sugar, fat, calories,...
Now let us consider the problem of the man with three children and one fig tree. In the Talionis Commentaries we find a man whose will ordains that each fig be split into three equal pieces. This solution is just but impractical. The Annotations of Marduk speak of a...
When you’re the stage mother, your job is to attend every rehearsal or performance your daughter is in. It doesn’t matter if she’s an extra or in the lead role. You’re there to support her. The rules: always stand and clap at the end. Whistle loudly, the kind of...
She is the biggest of the girls, freshly turned, the musky sweetness of larch still lingering. Pleasant smile, rosy cheeks. Her eyes are painted open, though there isn't much to see inside the truck. But in the dim her imagination flies. There are others with her here...
One of the first times I was born was during the plague. Miracle of miracles, I survived! But Maman died, and my sisters, then Papa, and our man Bertran. Finally, I had to go, too. There was no one left to feed me, and the rats frightened me to death. * I awoke in the...
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...