Two decades of agony for a single piece of printer paper, annotated and signed, ceremoniously declaring the basic facts of my body.
The hill on Alpine Road looked steeper than I remembered.
“We spoke to the alleged perpetrator,” she says.
It’s November. Blue sky. Or not. I don’t know.
The world is not fully on fire yet, so I am crying instead of sobbing over machine-dried, vacuum-sealed seeds of Philippine rice resting in Norway's Global Seed Vault.
“He’ll be here any minute. Give him five.”
In suburban Seattle, I watched a one-eyed cat endure the injustice of crows.
Students toss clay scraps into a fifty-five-gallon garbage drum filled with slurry water.
I watched the man prop up his phone and press record.
Grace is unmerited favor extended to those who do not deserve it.
“Ow!” I grabbed my cramping belly and slid to the kitchen floor.
A miasma of Axe body spray and teen condescension fills the space between us.
We discover a key in our deceased mother’s dresser drawer, a string tied through the tiny center hole with a tag attached, labeled in cursive: “Who Knows?”
I blurt out the wrong thing to you, again, and see the pain on your face.
In the kitchen, I fixed my glasses with a paper clip, twisting the wire until the hinge held firm.
I steer us onto Plane Tree Drive, navigate round Botanic Park, then pull up near the zoo to let my daughter out.
We exited the metro, passed through the wickets, and headed to the escalator.
Me, in a morphine stupor, perched on a bedpan, my left leg immobilized following emergency surgery for a crushed tibia plateau.
In winter, the girl is taught coyote is enemy.
The automatic door slid out of the way.