Tonight, as it creaks open, and my head spins towards the hallway, as though the truth were only a nightmare . . .
Labels, slapped across cellophane, covering flesh in the meat aisle, read “half price.”
How had I never considered the possibility that he’d sell his house by the ocean, where I most felt her?
I open my eyes and realize the day drifted away.
My eight-year-old gasps as the fort she so painstakingly constructed sags under its own weight, then crashes to the ground.
In the concrete riverbed, our team passes out clean works.
All morning, her cries slice through the sparkling arias of woodland songbirds.
Because misery loves company, my friend Jed and I are grading freshman essays together.
The smooth, old wood shaped like a closed fist slips inside my hand-knitted sock.
The cashpoint screen screamed “ten euros” in bold white next to “Account Balance.”
I wiggled my five-year-old toes, oblivious to anything beyond myself.
Suddenly something large breaks the surface.
“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.