“It’s a doll!” I say, convinced by the Barbie-sized shape hiding inside the grab bag I’ve bought at my favorite vacation stop.
"When are you coming back, mamma?" asks my three-year-old. Only his forehead is visible on the screen, and then I see his lips puckered and zoomed out as he kisses the phone.
The terrible hope of a moth trapped in a spider’s web caught my attention.
The train unexpectedly stopped in rural South Carolina, the middle of nowhere.
In the silence before my mother’s funeral, the rabbi pinned a black grosgrain ribbon to my lapel.
You were always the handy one, but you were out of town.
His mother never had a headache; my mother always suffered from them.
I could not stop the boy from running home with the treasure he had found half-buried in the dirt on the street, gooey and translucent like a jellyfish washed up on the beach …
Joe, my friend’s son, fed the animals, laughed, chattered, explored.
It’s 10 p.m. when the message pops up. Unknown user, familiar last name.
We met at a law school mixer, but I remembered him because of the rain.
Reddish hackles, gray wings, black tail. I’d cared for him since he was a chick.
What I remember best, thirty years later, is that all at once I was unfractured, breathing in five dimensions, as if my skin were pulled by the waxing moon across the reckless continents.
The first time my heart stopped, I was asleep.
She looks up at us from her bed, eyes still bright, not yet made heavy by the epilepsy medication.
“You’re so pretty. You take after me,” she used to say as she stroked my hair.
When I picked it up, it gave a sort of solid and liquid tumble.
My child found a globe of ice bigger than his embrace.
When I told my ex-wife that she would need either a letter from me or a court order to move our ten-year-old daughter out of state nine years after the divorce . . .
I’m reading magazines as I wait for the doctor. Page three says there’s a hole in the ozone and we can’t escape it.