“Come here!” my sister yelled as I climbed the pool ladder, my eyes and freckled nose stinging from chlorine.
I was joyously belting out the words, “I played my drum for him . . . .”
Stan proposed to his posse of six eight-year-olds that we cross a long, wooden railroad bridge over a swollen river.
As I hug my grandma goodbye, we go through our usual exchange. “I love you.” “I love you more.”
“Lumayas ka!” my Papa said after another argument when I threw him hateful glances and spewed defiance at his face.
My father asks if I know what an ammonite is.
Sitting in the truck, waiting, each minute felt longer, like ten.
She condemned ephemerality, and yet she drove us away from dad in her secondhand Ambassador, unaffected.
I changed my pronouns two years ago.
Dad’s first flight came just years before a stroke took away his words, then spiraled him toward the grave like a penny spun into a charity funnel, round and round and suddenly gone.
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.