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Fiction
Taking Care
Now that our mother’s living alone has started to give everyone pause, my siblings and I are gearing up for the battle over what to do next. She will not be asked for her opinion.
May 2013
Blueberries
Basia watches her granddaughter, Lalka. No matter what else she does — digs in the garden, pulls weeds in the greenhouse, peels the potatoes — always she watches her granddaughter, who has a reddish-purple birthmark over her neck and jaw and part of her cheek. Her husband, Zbigniew, watches Lalka too.
April 2013
Say
He drapes one hand over the wheel, reaches the other out to her, palm up, like he’s trying to make a point, like he’s trying to come to the point — but she’s not listening. We don’t even have to say that. You can see it in the way her gaze has gone as flat and vacant as these plains. See the sunburnt angle of her jaw? That quick tremble of her lip? For her sake let’s say that, finally, he shuts up.
April 2013
In The Valley Of The Kings
I was eleven the summer the fire broke out. In the spring of 1967 my mother, my father, and I had moved to Umberland, Pennsylvania. An old miners’ neighborhood sprawled across the southern half of town, and its residents burned their garbage in a used-up strip mine, a pit of shale and sandstone scraped clean by bulldozers.
March 2013
Michael The Armadillo
They’d made it through all the Michaels, Carrie and Dan believed. They’d made it through Michael J. Fox’s comeback and Michael Vick’s arrest and Michael Douglas’s cancer, made it through the terrible summer when Michael Phelps won all those gold medals in swimming, and then the next terrible summer when Michael Jackson died on every channel for days and days.
February 2013
Sanctuary
She boarded the train that propelled her into the past and the future both at once, giving her time to shift perspectives, to find her edges again, the places where her body and the world met.
January 2013
A Good Idea
It seemed like a good idea when you saw him on the ledge, poised on the other side of the guardrail and staring down at the water. It was nighttime, or almost nighttime, daylight falling into a tailspin of dusk, and the road was empty, and you nearly didn’t see him at all. But when you did, you slowed your car.
December 2012
Wetlands
In the woods I saw box turtles mating, and I got down on my hands and knees to watch. The female had brown, mournful, thick-lidded eyes, a hooked beak like a bird, and a delicate, curving mouth. She stretched her wrinkled neck away from the male. I felt sorry for her.
November 2012
It’s Hard To Know What You Need
I’m at my mother’s funeral, as I have often been before in dreams and waking musings, though this time she is really dead, and here I sit, an addled orphan at an age where she and I might well have just decided we would continue along together till the end.
October 2012
Someday Is Today
My sister’s husband died recently, and sorrow has made her a little girl again. Although she’s thirty-nine, I keep catching glimpses of her little-girl face, the one I know from old photographs and junior-high yearbooks.
September 2012
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