With a broken-down oven, in a hotel kitchen, on an uninhabited island
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Steve Fellner is an assistant professor of English at SUNY Brockport. His essays have appeared in Northwest Review, North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Quarterly West, among others. He lives in Brockport, New York.
The day my mother and my brother flew in, I went to pick them up at the airport. At first I’d told them I couldn’t be there: I had to teach a class. (Of course, as the instructor, I could easily have canceled.) My mother’s reply was “So help me God, if you make us get a cab, I’ll pick up the goddamn white courtesy phone at the airport, page Mother Nature, and tell her to send Katrina to find you.”
Having failed to pay the rent for three months, my mother, my little brother, and I came home to find an eviction notice on our trailer. The front door was barred.