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Romantic Love
The Return
This is what life does, as an act of great / though often misunderstood kindness — it brings us / over and over again to the same sorrows.
April 2012A Castle In Outer Space
There was a flutter in my rib cage, a somersault of uneasiness. I hadn’t witnessed such concentrated weirdness up close since my parents were alive: my father’s conspiracy theories and colon-cleansing elixirs; my mother’s ground-up lithium in a locket around her neck.
March 2012
Warning Signs
An identity thief, a flat tire on the Williamsburg Bridge, a cat named Cinnamon
February 2012
It Burns
All that fall and into the winter, bulldozers and cranes cleared away the wooded top of Ransom Mountain, knocking down trees and shoveling dirt and rock into dump trucks, leaving behind a flat, barren expanse. Come spring, we were told, the mountain’s top and back would be a landfill that three counties would pay to use, creating jobs in town for the first time since the mines had shut down. But no one I knew thought very much about that.
February 2012
Hold Everything Lightly And Nothing Will Hurt Us
I’m driving north on I-95. The asphalt rushes beneath my tires, and when the speedometer hits eighty, the steering wheel vibrates in my hands, this little sedan protesting. The trees along the interstate burn orange and gold, and the northern half of the East Coast stretches ahead of me. I’m driving north on I-95 in October, which means I feel like someone is dying.
January 2012
Buenos Aires, Dancing, December 1982
Day after day we write his memories. It’s harder for me to help with the ones from before we met, but still I write them. He tells me everything he can remember, and the rest I fill in from the stories he’s told me in the past.
December 2011
No Reason
After I flunked tenth grade, I went to an alternative school for two years until I tested out. Now I’m at a high school with a college track. My guidance counselor is Mr. Peboe. I think he might have a crush on me because he is always calling me into his office.
November 2011
Awkward Walks With Unavailable Men
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when my wanting became a problem. Sometimes I think it was at seventeen, when I was a Mennonite girl from a dead-end dirt lane, determined to leave for the Big City, for college, for a career and money and high-heeled shoes and shorn hair, and to have absolutely nothing more to do with the hilltop Mennonites.
October 2011
Cheap Thrills
Contraband cinnamon, a coupon for a free turkey, evening constitutionals
October 2011
View From The Overlook
Large, feathery clusters of snow spiraled toward the windshield. From the passenger seat, Nora could see between the thinning trees to the ravine below, where snowflakes seemed to hover and rise in undulating waves. For a moment she felt content, leaning back in her seat as Gil steered the car up the steep incline.
October 2011
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