“Uterine atony,” I hear the doctor say as the neonatologist is showing me my brand-new baby. I glance at my blood pressure before looking at my son.
“Uterine atony,” I hear the doctor say as the neonatologist is showing me my brand-new baby. I glance at my blood pressure before looking at my son.
“First,” I say, “we need to beat the cream cheese until it's smooth.”
The leash suddenly went taut as Louis spotted the dead squirrel and took it in his mouth.
“911. What’s your emergency?” “I’m having a brain hemorrhage.”
I think the world must have stopped hurtling recklessly through space.
I had been sitting at the front of the school bus when it happened.
Mom buttoned me into my best pink dress, a ribbon tied in my hair, and sent us off to the restaurant where a famous pianist was booked.
When I turned twelve and began to struggle with the higher notes, I faked it, lip-synching the words.
My brain Rolodexes forward, backward, cataloging things that won’t stay done as I fight to stay with this moment.
Not quietly at ninety, a few mourners, a cleric using dismal platitudes. But disastrously. Throngs crammed into pews.
I’d been warned not to stare but was lost in reverence, enchanted by our taut intimacy.
Before I can swipe left, you call.
The scrap of paper lay facedown on the pavement. I picked it up out of curiosity, or greed perhaps—maybe it’s valuable.
When I was eleven years old, my Dad took me to a meeting in a smoky, crowded union hall.
The day of the Presidential Fitness Test, we ninth graders are asked to grab hold of the thick rope in the middle of the gym floor and shimmy up to the red tape overhead, using arms and legs.
She sees me and freezes. Our eyes lock. Coincidence, not genetics, that they are the same blue.
Nervous and timid at my new job at the chain pharmacy, I was not prepared for conflict.
He drops me at a bus station and speeds away. I don’t know where I am or how to ask.
The sink felt cool and solid beneath my shaky hands. I steadied myself over it before looking up into the mirror.
Whenever I visit we mostly sit as familiar strangers and talk about the tea. Once in a while, though, there’s a small window, five minutes max, when her eyes sparkle.