Outside the Y a mother plops her shrieking toddler onto a stone bench for a stern talking-to.
Outside the Y a mother plops her shrieking toddler onto a stone bench for a stern talking-to.
My wife tells me Randall called. She reminds me I met him and his wife, Gloria, at her class reunion a couple years ago.
We wind our way along the canal ribboned with trees shifting into fall brilliance, sky an azure stillness and everything turning.
Before I begin this chapter of my life, Sandy should know about my past.
The face is friendly, with slender, graceful arms that I can’t see moving.
There wasn't enough entertainment when I was growing up.
My mother tells me her new boyfriend calls her every day at seven.
Mile eighteen. My body speaks to me; it tells me to stop.
Lying still, curled tight, I try to calm my frenetic mind by focusing on the inaudible breaths of my two young sons asleep down the hall.
Just a few short months into a makeshift marriage—husband again seeing the woman he promised he’d left behind—I sat in our ’67 Plymouth . . .
Your father is in good health? my doctor inquires, updating my family medical history.
My mom and I made the trek to downtown Nairobi to buy a wrought-iron lamp to hang above her dining room table.
Everyone, including white people, sees it.
I call to see if you’d like my mother’s diamonds.
The closest I ever got to New York was Las Vegas. Nearly two hundred feet atop the roof of a casino.
Another girl brings him to the party. We yell Surprise! and they beam at each other.
Three blocks away, my husband and I hear the rolling, roaring, rushing of 3,160 tons of water plummeting over a cliff on the US-Canada border.
I press my fingers against the foggy glass, soaking in the last lingering glows.
You lift a fold of wrapping paper, winter blue with curls of silver, peeling back the foil with more care than it deserves.
I stood at the mirror and traced my childhood with my finger along the white roots that appeared in my part.