“He’s not breathing,” I shouted, and I guess my friend Jerry called 911, he must have, because I was busy running across the room . . .
I doubted my eight-year-old daughter Rose when she said she would someday marry a man who would live with and care for her disabled brother, Gabriel.
We’d been in that house before. The construction was a stopped clock.
Stop scratching, Mama hisses, flicking my six-year-old fingers off my calves.
The pickup game featured plenty of contact: banging in the paint, wrestling on defense, boxing out for rebounds.
looking down at pilot on the bare linoleum, my husband said we should place him back on the blanket.
“Don’t you dare walk in empty-handed,” my mother yells to me from the kitchen.
It was Saturday at the indoor farmers market and I was half awake as I stood in line for pickles. “Where are you from?” the vendor asked.
I arrive in rubber boots to help Rich and Nancy process their flock.
The irony is, I am not a judgmental person, and yet here we are, you (cowed) and I (robed), you telling me about how a night out celebrating your birthday turned terrible . . .
Vacation adrenaline still coursing through my veins, I tackle the mountains of laundry.
The nurse croons encouragement as the anesthesiologist mumbles, “It will sting.”
As I step off the airplane, tropical heat wallops me like a bag of bananas to the face.
I am three years old, standing on my twin bed, gazing at the wall.
Snow swirls along the icy black asphalt. I jarringly skid left . . .
His head rested on top of mine as his arms enveloped me. “I just get scared sometimes,” he said.
Dad, as always, noticed first. Giant paw prints in snow behind a granite boulder.
Now I’m buckling down.” I press Send before I can soften the text with lies.
I’d heard that Europeans went topless at the beach and tried it solo the summer of my twenty-second year.
Something between a thud and a crack. Almost soundless, yet not.