Arturo pulled a clunky wooden wagon along the creek. Its wheels bounced on every rock and ridge. He went out early in the morning before the sun moved high overhead and the temperatures heated to the 90s. The wildflowers from spring had withered, replaced by yellowed grass that stood almost as tall Arturo, which is to say almost as tall as a man of small stature.
Martin sat at a small patio table at the craft brewery. A pinkish sunburn on his bald spot and the slight build of an introvert were his most striking features. His friend Gabe sat across from him trying to attract the attention of the waitress. Gabe, with his large shock of white hair and broad shoulders twice the size of Martin’s, was not used to being ignored.
The first time he did it, it was a joke, really. An attempt to amuse himself during his otherwise soul-crushing nine to five.
“Per our recent conversation.”
“Circling back regarding the matter discussed below.”
“I just want to make sure I’m clear on next steps.”
“See attached.”
He wrote scores of emails every day. One hundred plus leading up to various milestones. Milestones. The term alone.
June 7
“Ma’am? Could you tell me one more time how you discovered the box?” The young policeman leaning in the doorway of Ruth’s living room looked up from the small, brown notebook he’d been writing in.
Ruth clenched her hands together in her lap to stop their shaking. After she’d called 911, she’d vomited into the kitchen sink, her teenage daughter, Grace, pacing behind her, saying over and over again, “I don’t know how that got there, Mom! I promise. I don’t know.”
“My daughter says it isn’t hers. Why would anyone bury a baby in my garden?” Ruth shuddered.
I’ve always been able to see faces in things. Yes, of course in clouds, like the ones that trail into my view from the bay window, the purple and pink sea horses and scoop-necked swans swimming across a windy sky while I listlessly watch the UPS truck trying to get down the driveway. But I sometimes freak out my friends when I describe the green man in the woods or the child’s face in the dark, green holly leaves. Layla says I should go back to school to get my art degree, implying that cutting hair isn’t artistic enough.
There’s a portrait of me with
cousin Frank, he’s six I’m three,
taken at my first home in the USA,
a stone apartment building at Van
Cortland Park, bedrock segue to
the rest of our lives…
I stared at the phone, wondering what to say to a man I thought all my life— was dead.
In 2008, two years before the call, everything I once knew had vanished. My angel Mom, who had given me hope, had passed away.
I pondered what I would do next. After some inner work, my purpose crept up inside me like a wildfire needing to be tamed. I heard the call.
A mongoose scurried along the mossy rock wall, darted under a pile of wood and dashed in front of my feet in search of tasty vermin. Its beady eyes glared up at me as if to say, “Entrance not for everybody.”
The lumberyard stocked cremation woods heisted by timber smugglers from endangered forests, carried by porters, hauled by lorry drivers, and sold on the black market with bribes paid at every junction.
When you were thirteen, your paternal grandparents Nonnina and Nonno already seemed ancient, having been married fifty years. Now you’re older than they were then.
But you remember …
Three things hang on their walls: a gruesome crucifix, a framed wedding photograph, and a billy club.
Despite its cozy name, despite its gentle rise and dive through corn fields and cow pastures, Comfort Hill Road has its hazards. In the warmer months, when driving to and from town, I watch for entitled tractors, escapee cows, flocks of cyclists racing for the cure. But today, a January afternoon in Vermont, it’s just “Collie Lady” on the road.
The feel of the rope wakes me. Coiled above my breasts, underneath, and pinning my hips against the kitchen chair. Arms pulled behind my back; wrists tied together. The rope smells like motor oil. I have no right to be surprised by my husband. I’ve watched enough Law and Order episodes to know that behavior escalates. I feel as though I’ve been drugged.
Evelyn skims the morning’s featured obituaries. Pure white-bread fare. Only one phrase grabs her attention: “in his kind and gentle way.” It’s simple but disarming, and it stirs a pang of empathy in her gut. She jots it down. Evelyn shakes her head at the grainy photos. When she reaches an advanced age, she’ll have a professional headshot taken just for this purpose.
Twilight on the coast always suggests the presence of a colossal beast in the slow inhale-exhale sound of the waves and the lingering humidity of the air.
Marcella felt its breath each time the automatic doors opened and closed. She had stopped looking up from the reception desk expecting to meet the source. Her focus was on her screen, where she cycled through real estate listings in the neighborhood next door…
Raja Rampaul was born on Lord Krishna’s birthday. When his mother Eela was pregnant with him, she had this recurring dream of a blue-skinned baby appearing on her bed, holding the Earth in his right palm, while rolling his head back and having a good laugh. It was as if the baby was the only creature in the world who knew the secrets of the universe.
A message was waiting for me at the front desk in Salvador da Bahia. Flávio would meet me later in the Largo do Pelourinho, a short taxi ride away. I unpacked. It was still afternoon, with time for a nap. I wanted to look fresh after so many hours in the air from Los Angeles. I caught myself wanting to look fresh for Flávio.
“Mom,” Betul says in a tired, yet apologizing tone.
“Betul? Where are you?”
“Mom, don’t worry. I’m fine.”
“But, where are you?” Her voice trembles.
“Mom, I’m sorry. I should have told you earlier. I’m in America.”
“In America?”
Stretched over 4.2 square miles, the Azovstal steel complex
is/ was a sprawling warren of rail lines, warehouses, coal furnaces, factories, chimneys
above essentially an underground city of tunnels seen as ideal for guerrilla warfare.
Mahmi has always felt to me part tame and part wild, part mother, part child. There is something vague about her I have yet to pin down. When people outside the family were about, she appeared like a grown woman, observing social etiquette, behaving as she was expected to behave, but she was somehow more fluid, more vulnerable, more changeable when we were by ourselves, just the two of us.
Stooping down,
here,
I remember the honey blooms
on my grafted kalanchoe
and the bursting April storm clouds
The sun had just appeared over the rim of the mountains. The air was crisp and smelled of mesquite. Carlos got out of his truck and rode the boom lift thirty feet up to the viaduct. Six lengths of rail had been craned in yesterday, now neatly stacked on a set of four-by-fours. A final course of rebar had been laid lattice fashion on top of the first pour, and Carlos worked his way through the iron grid to check the ties that secured each rod.
the Great Chicago Fire of 1871,
the Great Boston Fire of 1872,
and the Great San Francisco Fire of 1906
crowds the chemical space
of My Great-Grandma’s Kitchen Fire of 1977.
“Mr Seixas, as you are well aware, you are charged on an indictment containing nine counts. These charges allege you are everything from a brutal slaver to a terrorist. What do you say in your defence?”
The accused did not stir and in his sunken eyes caressed by the deep unflinching creases in his darkened skin, one could see the dying flames wrought within him…
Here on a yacht in the Gulf of Mexico,
as a shrimp boat burrows behind
through the cool, plowed path of our electric motors,
we drink another salty beer, our bare feet
sliding on the damp deck with each ocean wash.
Samson’s obsession with Julia Child began three weeks after his father’s funeral. He was watching TV late one Saturday night, numbly flipping through channels with the volume high enough that the couple living upstairs would surely complain yet again. The couch he was lying on was lived in, soft in the way that only comes from consistent use. Between the couch and the television set was a wooden coffee table, covered in a collage of water rings across the surface. An almost empty glass of water and an untouched plate of crackers sat on the edge of the table nearest Sam.