beginning at the bottom of stairs to a bridge next to the Santa Fe trainyard great grandfather never made it home that pay day stolen wallet stolen patriarch a ghost in the bloodline decades of drivers spotting his outline forever crossing the Mt. Vernon bridge footsteps quickening to oblivion a shadow in headlights …
dedicated to a cowgirl… Torn ticket to a rodeo, stained upside-down wooden raspberry basket, teal, brocaded pincushion the size of a child’s hand, dried bee balm bouquet. Well-worn lasso, shredded and dusty, rusted Campbell’s soup can brimming with marbles, baby bootie scuffed, eyelets misplaced. A black silk stocking, lace on its ankle, draped over rosewood branches crossed to the four winds, silver butterfly charm with busted clasp. Hotel key yoked to plastic diamond shield, letters faded, metal watering can with no handle, yellow coneflower sprouted from a crack in the soil. The marks “n o w” in the dirt,…
I left bits of body and micro-letters on strips of skin at her wedding. Some strips draped the backs of seats like coats. One note: To the bride: Some things are better left buried; does your husband know what you carry? I left every little bit about her. The outdoor wedding gave the guests a view of kayakers slicing rifts into the river. Their oars cut the blue water like scalpels. Caterers guarded hors d’oeuvres: pigs in blankets, cucumbers rolled into thin tortillas, and cream cheese and sliced meats, all delicacies in soft coffins. Everywhere, always, guests said how good…
All over this blue earth, life calls to life, dog to man, girl to an arum lily. Here, dear (insert your name), we have soup on the stove, steadily simmering but likely to fail again, blown-out lentils, too much sea salt. I open a book, examine a myth of survival, Celtic spirals, new moons. Blood soaks the stories— dancing warriors, severed heads. I taste a dollop of blueberry honey. Blueberry season lasts five weeks. Honey preserves its sweet residue. A bird sings so loudly it seems to be on the mantle, beak open, calling. Why do I live so…
By Amy Reardon When I first heard the title of Deesha Philyaw’s fiction debut, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, I had to read it. It was the power and elusiveness in that combination of words. Women + Secrets + God? Count me in. Turns out I wasn’t alone. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies debuted in September 2020 and promptly won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, The Story Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Today, Philyaw is at work co-writing and executive producing its TV series adaption for HBO…
I had never seen a bird flatten itself until I spied a sparrow slip through a slit in the eave of Aunt Ginger’s roof. It wore a black mask around its eyes, like people do around their fear-of-COVID faces, its feathers beautiful shades of black, gray, and green. I wonder what it would be like to gracefully flatten. I say gracefully because I know what it’s like to be deflated, and this isn’t that kind of metaphor. This is about fitting into the sacred shape of yourself—in this place, this universe, this eave that really needs you to be…
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. —C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed The way the afternoon light floods our front porch helps make my sadness bearable today. I scan the other houses on our block, their yards darker, but with greener grass, and wonder how ours, the one with the dead child, has the brightest light. This morning on YouTube, I watched a TODAY show interview with Matt Mauser, the husband of one of the victims in the Kobe helicopter crash. The newscaster, Savannah Guthrie, asked him if he felt angry. I am scared more than…
Photo by Amanda Witherell The awful is inside the normal. Like normal is pregnant with awful. —Brian Doyle, “Everyone Thinks that Awful Comes by Itself, But It Doesn’t” April 4, 2017 Fanning Island rises into view slow as the morning sun—just a low, green strip of palms with a thin gap near the center. We steer our sailboat for the gap. A couple of church steeples and spindly radio antennas pierce the canopy. A man in a rough-hewn canoe anchored just off the island, fishing, waves a long, brown welcoming arm. Brian and I haven’t seen another boat or human…
Mine sprouted right through the top of my head. Everyone told me I should feel lucky, there were worse places it could pop up. Imagine the belly button? Or that crease in between the pinky toe and the toe next to the pinky toe? I tried to see the deeper meaning in my sprouting spot, though after years of research by botanists, herbalists, pathologists, and dermatologists, no official cause as to why these plants emerge from the body parts they do had been determined. Why couldn’t it have taken a subtler route? Somewhere hidden, not drawing attention from the masses,…
Each time I quit Prineville Insurance I tell them to stuff it. Each time they choke on the office philodendron, the dry erase markers, and the reams of useless memos waiting for the shredder as I walk out the door. The cost of my mother’s Ensure, dentures, bath railings, diapers — well, I can’t quit anytime soon. Get along to get a paycheck I keep telling myself, however much I resent this lousy mantra. On Tuesday Delores’s doctor downgraded her to bedridden, so now I have to find the money for a decent wheelchair, not the crappy kind Medicare pays…