A hand-stenciled sign planted beside the tree read, We must live together as brothers or perish together as fools. Martin Luther King, Jr.
A hand-stenciled sign planted beside the tree read, We must live together as brothers or perish together as fools. Martin Luther King, Jr.
I was anxious and bumbling. Compulsively feeling his forehead for fever. Joining him in crying jags.
Father motions her behind the steering wheel. We’re on the field he graded with a landing strip in mind, so where’s the harm?
My loving, difficult sister offered to come the weekend before my first child’s birth.
My 77-year-old mother and I have a system: She texts me an emoji every morning when she wakes to let me know she's alive, and I text one back as a receipt.
Miss Harvey announced that Bobby’s parents wanted to dedicate a tree for him. He was in our class before he died.
“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.