The basement was neat and tidy, everything had a place and there was a place for everything. The only natural light streamed in through slit windows set just below the ceiling and opened onto the grass of the lawn outside, …
I cry so rarely that I sometimes think I might lack the proper lachrymal ducts. Because no matter how sad I feel, no matter how deep my heart sinks or how far I am knocked sideways, I barely shed a …
Part 1
Do you know the difference between cement and concrete? You shouldn’t focus too hard on the science. It can’t explain it. It was never cement, and always concrete I think. But we called them men of cement because …
I am more careful than you can imagine. If someone rings the doorbell, I approach the door in mask and gloves. I wash my hands so frequently that the skin at my knuckles looks like parched mud, and I never …
Summer, 1995
The last of several strokes put my mother in a nursing home in Flushing, Queens, where my father’s constant visits and meddling in her health and welfare unnerved the aides, the nurses, the therapists, and the entire managerial …
The footbrake on Jim’s Mazda squeaked as he brought the car to a stop. He looked up at the house across the road as he switched off the engine. A memory flooded his mind: him and his father out the …
It’s a long time since I’ve bothered with anybody else. Even longer since I’ve cared what they thought of me.
Oh, I know when the children pass my gate that they peer through the railings, in the hope they might …
Laura Lynn had a theory that a wedding encased men like a prehistoric mosquito in amber. The way a man was when you married him was the way he was going to be for the rest of your life. She came up with …
A man’s voice rises through the floorboards, muffled and unintelligible, but the little girl knows his message quite well. “Splosions,” she says somberly, mimicking the anchor’s delivery, as she pushes Mommy across the plastic floor and toward the pot boiling …