I bought the carved wooden cane from Dagfields Crafts and Antiques in Nantwich. It was fancier than my everyday mobility aid, and I walked down the aisle with it.
I bought the carved wooden cane from Dagfields Crafts and Antiques in Nantwich. It was fancier than my everyday mobility aid, and I walked down the aisle with it.
Meanwhile, at our school, they extracted bullets from the walls.
I sprint onto stage clutching math books and Pee-Chee folders, competing for the part of Eugene in a professional production of Grease.
Which is a joke to myself as I drop two, six, ten gelatin shells onto a buttery plate.
Up ahead of me, along an alley, a svelte and inky cat saunters toward a teen chipmunk who runs toward—not away from—the predator.
I was eight years old. The curtains in my bedroom slow waltzed in the evening breeze.
While my stepfather and his teenage son preen like peacocks and bellow know-it-all slurs, Mom unloads countless boxes.
“I’m going to do a wind dance,” she says. “To scare away the wind.”
“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.