Mindset, free flowing, thought exploding
Sunsets,
Seasons, and syllables wrapped into one
Tiny perfect package
But also, great plains
Limitless at face value
And deeper when it’s said

I don’t recall exactly when it first occurred to me that I might be gifted at what I was doing. Others seemed to have noticed, and there were the occasional third-person references to potential—to a bright future. It all felt pretty normal to me, so I just kept doing what I was doing. The assignments quickly became more demanding, the challenges exhilarating and always thoroughly mastered.

On Monday, at the end of his session with Boadecia, the doctor, leaning back in his chair with his hands crossed behind his head, inquired, with affected nonchalance, “So, you can bring me some business?”
Boadecia, springing from her chair, jumped six inches off the floor, clapped her hands three times, and grinned.
“I can bring more business than you’ll know what to do with.”

In college, she learned about rape myths, the misconceptions and excuses created to downplay the crime and blame the victims. Dani saw the myths plastered on poster board and in the margins of flyers hanging on the walls of every campus building, myths that she didn’t even know she had believed until they were spelled out for her in words and, one by one, debunked.

The twin sisters are fraternal to the sorrow of Peg, the eldest born just before midnight and therefore on an earlier day than Hillary. Their separate birthdays aren’t what riles her. When they were young, Hillary’s parties coming on the heels of Peg’s were forced reruns, neither child getting the celebration she wanted. The trouble is that Peg actually resembles a peg…

The tank had worn thin with rust since no one maintained it and more was stored inside than it was designed to hold. Pressure had built high in the oversized vessel and now a jagged crack opened along its exterior. A purple liquid, the secret ingredient in a successful line of chemical preservatives, oozed from it with a noxious smell and pooled on the linoleum floor.

The Y is around the corner from his architectural firm, and I would see Les in the pool every weekday from 1:30-2:30 p.m. That’s why, this fall, I thought it odd when he wasn’t there for a whole week.
Eating in the middle of the day made him sleepy, he said, so he forfeited lunch for ten laps of freestyle followed by ten laps each of the back, breast, and sidestrokes.

Kevin sat alone in the dappled sunlight beneath a towering oak tree surrounded by gravestones. He gazed fondly at the sculpture of a young woman stricken with grief. Death, like love, obsessed him. The noonday sun etched deep shadows in the mourning bronze figure that knelt on one knee with her head bowed. Despite being covered with the patina of age, it was lovely in its depiction of sadness.

“Can we do a drive-by?”
When Chris gets home from work, after he’s changed, but before they’ve eaten, Molly asks him. She clasps her hands under her chin, like she’s praying. She tries to keep her face from doing that grimace thing that Chris can’t stand. He says it’s her panic, her pain. It makes him want to curl up in a ball.

Instead of confessing my sins at church, I found salvation in my bedroom. Like my father, I wasn’t a fan of altar calls or public confessions, though some kids reveled in the extra attention they got from adults when they participated in the praise and worship service. I felt like an imposter, and the attention made me uneasy. I felt closer to God when I was away from everyone else, alone in the woods or in my tree house.

The way that this forty-something-year-old blonde wearing turquoise cat-eye glasses thwapped my stomach – you’d think she was picking out watermelon. Her pinkish, Anglo-Saxon phalanges bounced off of my ballooned belly. I lay atop the medical exam table, under the singe of fluorescent lights, thinking about the belly I wanted back, the belly I had only a few hours before. A belly that melted into the interstices of my ribcage.

If you walk the West End on Commercial Street in Provincetown, inevitably you’ll pass Joe’s Coffee and Café. Early morning, there’s a line out the side door for takeout and inside, the structure that had originally been designed as a bank, has seating throughout. Outside, in front, are a number of wrought iron tables painted wet-black, some under blue umbrellas for shade.

While I stared in awe at a huge spider sitting atop a thick, ropy, sparkling cobweb, light filtering down through Meiji Jingu’s forested path, Annie, back in our rented apartment, was fuming, wondering where the hell I was.
My sister and I had chosen to travel to Japan for ten days, neither of us knowing the language.

Maria Collins used to be so childish, such a baby. Oh yeah, she was going to change the world, take down the man, destroy the machine, let freedom bells ring and then tra-la-la happily ever… never. Such kiddie fantasies. Juvenile righteousness… Right. Juvenile stupidity is more like it. She kicks off her worn-out blanket, sits up and adjusts the straps on the leg, and ties up her boots as tight as she can.

In high school I was friends with two girls, Ida Kowalchuk and Fiona Petrowsky. Ida and Fiona had known each other since elementary, and shortly after I entered their lives the three of us became thick as thieves. Wherever we went, whatever we did, it was always as a trio. But Ida and I shared something undeniably special. We clicked from the get-go, as they say, while Fiona—a quiet, diffident girl, boringly polite—slowly moved from center stage to the darkened corners of the background.

The old pickup sped through the night like a spaceship in the void. The only contact with reality was the faint whir of studs on frozen asphalt. Lake felt disembodied — a vagrant thought alone in the dark. He loved night travel when reality only occasionally interposed in the form of a long-haul trucker or startled moose.
The truck veered toward the shoulder as he passed through a dense bank of wind-swept snow.

Despite many legal infractions, Uncle Joe had only been arrested once. In the summer of 1987, Joe traveled to Eugene, parked his van in the middle of Autzen Stadium’s parking lot, laid out a large blanket and spent a couple hours fixated on a dragonfly that kept buzzing around his vehicle. The Grateful Dead were to play the next day, the weather was hot, and the stadium was the largest venue in the area.

The mere thought of a huge sailboat on land, propped up on stilts, was so unnatural that as hard as Felix tried to suppress revulsion, he couldn’t help but feel it rise.
He was fourteen and the only times he had seen sailboats were years earlier when they lived in America and he was in the backseat as his parents drove along the Hudson or within glimpsing distance of Long Island Sound. They were birds, that’s what sailboats were. Birds skimming the ripples of water. Complete unto themselves. Untethered. Free.

How can I forget the press of the crowd, the feeling of being swept up in history that lunar New Year in Hong Kong? Throngs packed the walkway by the city’s harbor, and we were snugly pressed in the midst of them. We had stopped in Hong Kong for a few days on our way to Shanghai for research on a book I was writing. And those few days coincided not only with the Chinese New Year, but also Hong Kong’s last New Year celebration under British rule.

In the dead of winter I deliver my child to a residential treatment center for substance use. It’s over three hours from home, through a winding mountain pass. J is fourteen. I adopted him when he was eleven. Before this, our longest separation was a four-night summer camp stint but even then, he called each evening. Here, he cannot call for one week. I cannot visit for ten days.

They say the good thing about small towns is everybody knows you. They say the bad thing about small towns is everybody knows you. You’ve felt the weight of both of these truths in your life, in your small town. It’s true, however, that as a very young Mum there was a certain protection, a certain safety in being known, of your family being known. Of being ‘someone’ in this place.

Our first in-the-flesh meeting literally blew that chemistry test to smithereens.
Parading online dating sites since my husband’s separation was a fascinating hobby of hope, which I entertained sporadically. This cyberspace, relationship, and reality series rarely seemed to meet my expectations. Having endured my fair share of disappointments, I was seeking a hibernation of sorts.

Eyague Ortiz de Toledo stood in the fresh white sand and squinted from the beating sun. It was very hot in this new place, this new place that did not feel so new, and Eyague mused on the favor granted by the Providence he liked to call… well… he did not like to call it Dios as his compatriots blithely pronounced with the tension of spittle between their teeth. No, in his mind, quietly and to himself, Eyague preferred to call it El Verdadero. The True.

The river was wide and moving at a brisk clip. Its dark, choppy surface ran past desolate sandy banks suggesting some barren shore. Sad trees with anemic branches could be seen reaching out desperately in all directions. In the distance low rolling hills seemed to wait listlessly for a defiant sprout of green to break through their hard, stubborn soil.