One summer, we sat on the stoop in front of my best friend’s building and her mother taught us to crochet.
Aunt Celestina carefully packaged party gifts for the kids in red-and-white polka-dot boxes she’d bought at the Dollar Store.
There’s an intruder in my kitchen.
I love music but I don’t dance. The rare times I’m asked I politely decline, but this guy was especially insistent.
We tramp around the lily pad-filled lake, eavesdropping on conversation fragments.
“Excuse me.” A man wanted to sit on my aisle seat.
On line at ShopRite, the plump woman behind me, lifting a package of pickled beets from my cart, asks “Are these any good?”
“Daddy, twirl!” our five-year-old daughter squeals the first time she sees them wearing a dress.
“Five minutes remaining!” is the shout of my coach as the workout hits the home stretch.
She is like a rosebush in her long dress of bold pink and red flowers.
Every morning, my daughter spritzes them with her purple spray bottle decorated with mermaid stickers.
I missed my period, I tell him. His wide eyes betray hope.
On the hot Upper West Side, I was rising from traumas’ ashes.
My condo overlooks a school parking lot. Occasionally, a car arrives, cones are placed, and a teenager slides into the driver’s seat.
The ceiling fans swayed; the beds jiggled.
My youngest is the first to call it. “The mom is going to die.”
Everyone is speaking French. She tries a few words, but her new mother-in-law cuts her off.
Each Christmas was the same as the previous one.
I stand on the hillside and watch under hot sun. “Take your marks.”
It’s eight in the morning. It feels so odd being the only passenger in the car.