We dreamed we could fly, worked to make it happen. To this day, when I’m once again gathered with my two brothers and my sister on the concrete slab, poured and worked by our father decades ago, lumpy section by lumpy section, we point our fingers at the tree and we remember the day Clery, my younger brother, jumped from the tree with two boards and an old sheet strapped to his arms.
Read MoreIn the hotel restaurant, my mother and I have talked about everything already. School, my brother, college. I’ve made a crane, then a dog, then a fish out of my cloth napkin, which now sits discarded in my lap. She squints at her phone from above her glasses, perusing her thousand unread messages, the bags she is eyeing to purchase, the headlines and markets of the day.
Read MoreEarly in my childhood, our family had a visitor. I remember a fragment of that weekend. There was no event or tragedy. Vague and visceral, but it still resonates.
Read MoreAs usual, I saw John today, guitar and body perched on an overturned, industrial-sized paint pail. From the distance I heard his voice first — the soft, off-key, but familiar John Denver words mixed with the howling winds: “Almost Heaven...West Virginia...” His entire repertoire is this song, plus two others, which he plucks over and over again with blackened fingers in black fingerless gloves.
Read MoreFrom Mosby’s Medical Dictionary, 9th edition:
Read MoreDon’t close your eyes.
Read MoreTheir pickup trucks loaded with vats and food trays, the weathered faces peered from dented cars as they inched through a white-washed suburb of Phoenix on their way to the old cemetery
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While performing the role of receptionist for an uninspiring financial company, a job as bland as a rice cake, boredom inspired me to explore an online job board where I stumbled upon a particular listing that caught me by surprise. It was a casting call for a Joan Crawford look-alike.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez
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