MARIA HUMMEL is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University and lives with her husband and son in San Francisco, near the only natural, aboveground creek in the city. Her writing has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Literary Mama, and Ploughshares. Her essay in this issue won the 2009 Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award from the Salem College Center for Women Writers.

The Curtain

by Maria Hummel, November 2009 (Issue 407)