In the Iron Mountain maternity ward, eight hundred miles north of Graceland, a nurse repeated what the radio said: “Elvis is dead.” B was born, black strands slicked to his head. He never liked Elvis’s music. Hip-high, B tended toward…
The First Time I Tried McDonald’s
At school and on the playground, children crowded around one another, laughing. I noticed their laughter. I heard it. The children were always laughing, even if the clouds were setting in above them.
Notes from Underground
It is naïve to suggest that you cannot love someone to whom you wish to cause pain. If that were so, what a different world we would live in.
Next Time Won’t You Sing With Me
Tell it muffled, tell it crooked, whisper it into a thousand layers of hospital green cotton, bubble it up through a vat of Adriamycin. Or not. Maybe best not to tell it at all.
Here You Go
Just so you’ll know: this doesn’t end with me doing the right thing. Why else would it stick with me for forty years? Who has the time, space, or inclination to remember one’s moral successes? Don’t, however, go into this…
Tour Guide
I drive to the point where it feels illegal, like we are breaking some rule or another by being so far from the actual prison.
Joy
The perfume is called Joy, but the black box looked sinister to me as a kid, funereal; it looked like it should hold ashes, cigarettes, a lifeless heart.
Eggbert
I will bring home with me an overflowing collection of memories, both terrific and terrible, of the people I met in this razor-wired land of misfit toys.
On Time
If I could reverse time, I would pick up the phone that night. Amid the Sturm und Drang of a coat-closet-cum-Manhattan-restaurant, I am nestled into conversation with my husband and sister, the steam from the kitchen making soft vignettes of…
Good Night, and Good Cluck
There are myriad ways to kill a chicken, but by this point, I would have put the chicken in the car by a lake and released the parking brake.
A Glimpse of Abundance
For two months that summer, like Alice in Wonderland, I stepped out of one life and into another.
Checkmate
In Soviet Ukraine, where chess mattered, Igor Borisovich’s difficult personality was forgiven as a side effect of his chess master genius.