When I say "car," it doesn’t sound like a crow crying out. I don’t “warsh up” or “dash off to the loo.”
Probably two or three-hundred pounds of bare naked man is bobbling towards me along the sidewalk outside of the Soldier’s Grove Public Library on Main Street.
My computer is whirring, the screen hot to touch.
My girlfriend’s nephew, barely five, alternated between squeezing my hand and excitedly scooting ahead to the onsen, then skipping back to us.
Dad was dead, but that was beside the point.
Whenever my mom came over, she would, within minutes of her arrival, move all of my knickknacks around.
I hold my breath as I ask the secretary over the phone what my neurosurgeon said.
As I stand to check on my dad again, my mum stands, smiles, and tells me to focus on finishing the lecture note.
After four daughters and a new wife, my father says to me one afternoon, “I wish you were born a boy.”
I wear her clothes daily, sometimes just one article, sometimes an entire ensemble.
After nine days in the hospital, I sit in lamentation in my usual spot on the sofa watching life outside the window.
Driving home late, a man lying in the road, a mangled bicycle, a BMW pulled over, three people standing in a semi-circle looking lost.
Against the breezeblock heat, a cactus wren flits in slow shutter. I simmer poolside, kiss the sweaty rim of a tall glass.
I asked how I could help him. Silence.
If I squint my imaginoscope just right, the garden shed morphs into the writing shack of my dreams . . .
“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.