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Green

Katrina had been talking about the garden for years, as long as he’d known her. Some women dream of white weddings, or sandy beaches, or new diamond rings; she dreamed of spinach and lettuce, garlic and tomatoes, and tall native grass in the spring. Each day, the man looks out the window above their bed and sees that there is more to be done, that her garden is green but not green enough.

Sunbeams

As I grew to adolescence, I imagined, from closely observing the boredom and vexations of matrimony, that the act my parents committed and the one I so longed to commit must be two different things.

Shirley Abbott

The Marriage Bed

A rouge wave, a hand-bound journal, a Catholic priest

Last Bid

He is genuine and soft, not flirting or wanting anything, and his kindness drains her. But it also sends her a wave of courage; his honesty has made way for hers, and she will try to get as close as she can to saying what cannot quite be said.

Photographs By Art Myers

I am still haunted by the memory of the phone call from my mother telling me in a trembling voice that my sister Joanne, still in her thirties, had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Following a prolonged, heroic battle to survive, she was eventually to die from that disease. Two decades later, I anxiously faced a surgeon in an antiseptic hospital waiting room as he uttered the dreaded words “Your wife has breast cancer.”

Open Season

The redwoods of northern California rise around us as we snake along Highway 101 somewhere south of Eureka. The air here is plush, sunlight slanting through wisps of fog among the trees. Looking out the window, my daughter says, “Look, Mommy. The light is realer.”

A Little Love

Strange Places

A toilet paper roll, a tiny red metal bicycle, an out-of-body experience

Leaving The West

The first time I hear the voice is in the fall, when the larch trees have just begun to change color. I’m driving out of Washington’s Blue Mountains along Cloverland Road just above the Snake River. Cloverland is a series of hair-pin turns and S curves bordered by a sheer drop into a canyon full of snakes, sage, and yellow star thistle.

January 2000

Fear is nearby. God seems impossibly distant. Fear comforts me in a voice that’s so familiar. God’s voice comes to me as the barest whisper. I’m rarely quiet enough to hear it.