For those few seconds I could feel everything that had happened to me and everything that would happen to me riding through my blood, overlaid in a kind of thick textured darkness behind my closed eyes and I felt my adolescent loneliness as fully as I ever would. I was filled with my lonely breath. I was the god of my solitary self, alone there in it.
Read MoreOn the second weekend of November I bought a small bottle of vodka and coffee liquor to make White Russians. Soup boiled forgotten on the stove as my husband and I poured each other refreshers, spilling cream across the counter. The heater in our house was broken and the girls’ socks hung half off their feet as they cut construction paper at the dining room table. Slivers of paper drifted down to join the dog hair on the floor.
Read MoreI came to Xinjiang to see someone from before whom I anticipated I wouldn’t find. I’d read in a gawking travel publication that there was a single gay bar in Urumqi where the drag queens dress as Uyghur women in traditional outfits and spin like dervishes to poppy Central Asian music. Maybe he’d be there. But it wasn’t likely.
Read MoreLike the cicadas of North America, the songs of the cicadas in Japan are unique to their species. Yet there is something about the timbre and the intensity of one that reminds me of the other. Back in the midwest, I sit in my living room and listen to the cicadas and, for a moment, I feel that I am in Japan.
Read MoreGerard says: Wait’ll I tell ye. He leans forward in his blue foldaway chair. This used to be a priory. It smells like sweet milk.
Gerard says: God love him. Patrick. He leans forward, his chair sinking into the floor. He says: God love him. Wait’ll ye hear. He turns his hands over, his palms facing up.
I sit between them, my da and his cousin. They have the same names. We all do. My da and his da, cousins and blood, names threaded through families as though hydrogen-bonded, the bases of a helix braided into each finger’s crease.
The air is heavy and it smells like sweet milk. I can feel my shoes sinking into solid ground.
Read MoreI was drinking Coca-Cola a lot. I was exercising that privilege a lot. And Pepsi’s okay. I like Dr. Pepper, too. And Mr. Pibb, whenever I can spot Mr. Pibb.
My older brother is a very decent person at the range. He never criticizes me at the range. He never hurts me at the range. He never corrects my posture. Or my swing. And I smack those golf balls. And sometimes, they go pretty far. At least it looks that way.
Read More
Beneath the old sarcophagus and inside the core of Reactor 4, there remains a black, molten mass. The mass has a name, though I’m not sure who named it. (Only a few people have seen it in person, and it’s unclear if any of them are still alive.) They call this black, molten mass the Elephant’s Foot, and if you look at it for more than five minutes, it may be the last thing you see. The blackened lava has solidified in parts and formed rings, loops like the bark of a tree. At its center, the Elephant’s Foot continues to burn. Thirty years later the wolves and deer and wild boars have returned, the sun is scorching, the mushrooms are scraping their fresh caps against the sky, oh my, oh my! And the core is still melting.
Read More
I remember every second: the shock of how very hot things feel very cold, the way my finger stuck to the plate, the skin tugging as I pulled it off, screaming as my grandmother ran the cold water. “Bet you won't do that again,” she told me. “Don’t just do things because people tell you to.'”
Read MoreHEMNES, named after the Norwegian word for “home,” left with your husband when you asked him to move out. All through the days and weeks that followed, you pushed remnant furniture across hardwood floors, liberated desks and armchairs from parallels, and right angles, arranged rooms for friends who didn’t yet exist.
Read MoreBlacking Out
I remember not realizing I was only wearing underwear and a T-shirt until I caught one of the responding police officers checking out my ass. White granny-panties with pink polka dots and a man’s neon green tank top with Kennebunk Maine written across the chest. We went there every Fourth of July. I’d bought the shirt only a month earlier. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to wear it again.
Read MoreMy grandmother sewed sachets and other things. She filled these little packets with lavender or scented them with strawberry oil and tucked them into drawers with underwear or socks or shirts. I still have tiny bundles of lavender I’ve brought with me from house to house, dresser drawer to dresser drawer. The scent is long gone.
Read MoreHe places his mouth over mine and releases a slow, deep exhalation into my mouth. I don’t pull back as I breathe it in. Ali and Jason are making out. I’m high, I feel like a cloud, like my head is separated from my body and for the first time this ethereal lure removes me from my mind and allows me to surrender.
Read MoreThe cakes have cracked open and shrunk in their paper cups, letting out their final gasps of moisture while dying, still in the oven.
“Oh, Betty,” I say into my microphone, looking at her with mock-flirtation, “you’ve outdone yourself.” Betty’s cheeks redden beneath their dusty powder coating. The audience murmurs in adoration. My timing is spectacular.
Read MoreWalk among petrified cacti in Arizona. Drive through the disheveled planes of Texas where dryness has cracked the earth and made it buckle. Say, “I love him, but I think he has a drinking problem.” In the time it takes to cross Texas, resolve to ask this question, which isn’t a question.
Read MoreLove is adoring children so much that you decide not to have them on account of your shit genes, race, and gun-nut country. After all, addiction is an enemy cavalry in, like, half of your chromosomes—along with refined abuse.
Read MoreOne day late in life, Alice acquired a husband. Our Alice…or so we’d assumed.
He was a small, dark presence in her house. Measly. Scrawny. Slope-shouldered. A husband, we were told, but in our view more like an ill-matched suitor. A timid if persistent petitioner. We could have easily ignored him except for the shock of his showing up in the first place.
Read MoreI always believed in blind dates, especially when arranged by my kid brother. He's the tall, good-looking one surrounded by beautiful people in the ad agency where he runs their biggest accounts. Then there's me, the bookworm—the divorced woman with two young boys holding down a job while juggling joint custody rules. You can image how little time I had to meet men.
Read More