I skim my father’s vanity-published, dictated, ghost-written memoir, as short and overcompensated as a two-block parade …
On our scooter ride home, my nine-year-old daughter asked, “Would it upset you if someone messed with your things?”
I couldn’t have known that her shoes would be important.
I push backward gently and lift my feet from the ground, the swing holding me tight.
It’s a Wednesday morning. Twenty-four bullets from a National Guard .50 caliber machine gun rip into Tanya Blanding’s four-year-old body.
Outside, glass-blue sky and air-sucking heat, avocado arms reached up from saguaros with spiked, crimson-tipped ocotillo neighbors.
The earring is antique gold with garnets and seed pearls.
“Do you see that handsome man over there?”
Once the mail carrier left, I rushed to yank out the envelope.
The popcorn man stands on the same corner.
My mother-in-law looks fragile, her arms mottled from blood draws and IVs.
I hear it, or some variation, whenever I cut across the corner wedged between coffee shop, liquor store, and the yield running off Osborne Street to River Avenue.
On my first visit home to Barbados, I stayed with Mum and her sister Vi, aptly known as the widowed dragons.
A hundred naked young men sat on a concrete floor, my seventeen-year-old self included.
When my 16-year-old was getting ready to see his friends, a knot developed in my gut.
I sashay into the bathroom, humming an upbeat tune.
Tall but awkward, I have always loved playing basketball.
Multiple construction deadlines and a meeting in five minutes.
“Tell me a story,” I ask.
Teri Boland commanded two friends to chase after me during recess.