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A Conversation with My Father

You could make things up that actually felt more like truth, somehow. You could build a world so precise that other people started to believe it, too. And if you didn’t believe the things my dad said, he’d find a way to make you.

The Night I Don't Remember

It doesn’t matter how many AA meetings you go to. As long as you are taking oxycodone and oxymorphone, you’re going to be high, and, as long as you have complex regional pain syndrome, you’re going to be taking something serious for the pain.

Unruly

I’m rebellious, defiant, so I’m sent to the barn, driven there by my newly single mom, or my newly single dad, or my grandparents, or someone else. Another parent told my mom I should try horseback riding. Ice-skating and tae kwon do and ceramics didn’t stick, but I can already tell I’m a horse girl.

Waterfall

Sex, to me, was like a solvent, cutting through layers of everyday grime. Without it, irritations accumulated with no way of wiping the slate clean; disappointment coagulated into distress. I felt forlorn, restless, and disconnected. Yet no matter how many times I sounded the alarm, my husband never seemed to hear me.

Shimmer

We don’t have all the facts—the social worker closed her eyes, her head dipping almost imperceptibly—but she did tell us that before he was moved into the foster system, at night, after his biological mother had passed out, this one impossibly small boy would tuck his younger siblings into bed and, in case his father somehow found his way home, sit in a kitchen chair across from the front door, an old air rifle pumped and butted up against the slender wing of his shoulder.

The Tap Out

I want to say that when Gavin told me he would kill me, I did not believe him, though there was nothing to suggest he was bluffing: He held me down in bed, his hand on my throat, knees locked around my waist, the alcohol-induced sheen to his blue eyes suggesting he could commit to his words without much thought. But the fear I should have felt—that I had felt minutes before, when I was running around, trying to escape him—was gone. I was gone. I had retreated into what the two of us referred to as my “shutdown mode.”

Glory of the Seas

A couple of years ago I moved into a retirement village and had to do some serious downsizing. My shell collection went from five shelves to two, not counting the larger shells on lone display and the dozen or so whelks scattered about.

I’ve kept a few rare and uncommon shells: the junonia, the paper nautilus, the carrier shell. I’ve also kept the ones Mother sent me from her own collection. The bleeding tooth. Shells and rocks friends brought me from their vacations. Fossils I picked up on the beach. The purple cockle half Bobby—now Bob—and I found fifty years ago. (He has the other half.) The small, ocean-battered Triton we found during his first visit to Oregon. Various turkey wings, tulips, and spirulas. The fossilized whelk.

My life story on two shelves.

And These Too Are Defensive Wounds

I’d thought the transcripts would help me write a letter to the parole board, but when I opened them, I saw a section of my own testimony at Maynard’s trial, and that was that. My head filled with hissing static; my heart raced.

Fire

A chair flies through your window and someone’s screaming for you to come out and you’re fourteen and he’s twenty and there’s nowhere to go and no cops coming and no one to make this any better, and you become a flame that can’t be extinguished.