Browse Topics
Childhood
How To Hit Your Dad
It never occurred to me when I was little that there was a world in which dads did not come home from the bar and beat up their oldest sons. It was totally normal, you know what I mean?
October 2014
Boys, Ten In All
The first bends his knees and raises his clasped hands over his head. Aims the slim knife of himself at the water. And leaps.
August 2014
The Magician
In 1976, the year we were supposed to be learning the metric system, we fell in love with Katy Muldoon. We were in the sixth grade, and Katy sat at the front of our math class, raising her hand for every question, as though all of the answers to all of the problems were merely floating in front of her eyes.
July 2014
Her Pillow
Our grandmother’s pillow, more than anything else, smelled like her. Her scent was talcum powder and lavender and rosary beads and butter and rectitude.
June 2014
Blue Magic
Every Friday night when I was twelve, I’d watch my cousin Derrick, fourteen, get ready to go out with a girl or to a junior-high-school dance. He’d take thick dabs of a hair grease called Blue Magic and rub it between the palms of his hands.
April 2014
Cash
A birthday cake, a plastic bag marked “liver,” a lovely one-room cement house
April 2014
We Did
Did we punch and hammer and jab each other as children, thrashing and rambling, a large family in a small house filled with brothers and one older sister with bony fists and no reluctance to use them?
March 2014
The Gull
I headed back to the cottage, carrying the gull out in front of me with both hands. All it did was paddle its legs. The bird weighed almost nothing, but deep in its dense feathers its body was hot, and the heat of it ran like a shock through my fingers and up my arms.
March 2014
A Murder Remembered
Grandma Rose’s younger brother Leonard was murdered thirty-seven years before I was born. As a child I was often told I resembled Leonard, which was meant to explain why Grandma didn’t take much interest in me. My father’s mother was a stern, often judgmental woman, and I was scared of her.
March 2014
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