I set my laptop next to me on the couch and go to my brother, immobile in his fully automated wheelchair.
I feed them in tandem. Wood ear mushroom for my three-year-old. A pincer-ful of macerated dumpling skin for the baby.
A woman beside me on a plane, maybe mid-sixties, watches Reels on her phone. I scroll through my own feed.
After dinner, decadently fed and watered, he stands next to me, leans in, his body vibrating.
I’m nervous on the phone so I wrote my query to the tax office on an envelope before I rang.
Bedtime. I lie on my back in a bedroom that is not mine, balancing a Mary Oliver poetry collection on my bent legs.
“Finished! It’s our family!”
The emerald ring my grandfather placed on the hand of the woman he expected would grow old alongside him.
Another circle round, wobbly on my skates, and the DJ said the magic words, "Requests open."
The tower speakers blared “My Generation.” “Pinball Wizard” followed.
"Grab the fence," he said. So I did.
Mom wouldn’t let my sister and me have a pet. After futile letters to Santa, we were told he couldn’t give gifts in contravention of one’s parents’ wishes.
Four dirt roads converge a quarter mile up the hill from my house. In August the dust gets so dry at the crossroads that I can see every track.
We flew down a country road on his 175cc Honda, roared up a hill, missed a curve, climbed an embankment and went airborne above a fallow field.
“I have to leave,” I tell my sister. We are in my room, the plywood of my floors exposed and my walls still unpainted.
When I was a kid, my mother never ate with us. She waited until we left the table to pick from our plates with her fingers.
The cards fell like rain, but my eyes followed them, steady.
She sneaks over, an 85-year old kid with a secret.
Leandro approaches me in the street, holding his skateboard. I want to avoid him.
I was glad Dad couldn’t read expressions when he slid a disheveled birthday present across my kitchen counter.