Browse Topics
Adolescence
Giant
Calling, “Soldiers! Americans!” Luu Mong hurried over the mounds of earth that connected the rice fields of the peasants. His mother’s voice trailed him (“Slow down, slow down”), a reminder that the enemy often left in a bloody heap any man, woman, or child who moved swiftly across the landscape. Luu Mong slowed to an amble, circulated among the peasants, and halted at the edge of the field where Thien and her grandma were weeding. “Soldiers,” he said. “Didn’t you hear me?”
November 2004
The Beauty Of Second Avenue
The foyer was home to my mother’s books but a place of exile for my brother and me. Around the time I was eleven and he seven, my mother began banishing us, singly, to the foyer without dinner in fits of unpredictable, unfathomable rage.
October 2004
Elopement
When I was fifteen, my father nailed my bedroom window shut to keep me from running off in the night. Almost forty years later, my sisters and I had to put him in a home with door alarms and special window locks to keep him in. Like me, he took off anyway.
October 2004
Red Eggs
I am eleven, not quite a little girl, not quite a young woman. There are things I know that I should not know, things of which I am not to speak, such as: I am not supposed to know that my father is a checkout clerk, not the grocery-store manager. I am not supposed to know the dolls I play with are stolen.
March 2004
Where You Could End Up
I’ve been staying with my friend Jackson, and I’m wearing his large red flannel jacket with the blue padding inside. I hope he lets me keep it. It’s a comfortable jacket, and I’d freeze otherwise. The wind is blowing. In Chicago in the winter, the wind chill is the only measurement that matters. I wish Maria would get here before the cold sinks into me permanently.
February 2004
Prodigal Daughter
Makendra trailed loss and mess and catastrophe the way Halley’s comet trails a cloudy veil of ice and gas. She was dark-skinned and lovely, with finely arched eyebrows and sharp cheekbones. She could have been a fashion model if not for the birthmark that covered one side of her face like a pale pink shadow.
January 2004
Turning Thirty
Hiking the Appalachian Trail, shoplifting, feeling grateful for being alive in this world of difficult beauty
January 2004
A Night Of Falling Alone
“Son, will you come downstairs, please.” He has pulled a chair up to the couch in the living room. We never use this room. The Christmas tree is placed in here each year. I would read in here as a child. That’s it. I sit on the couch and sink down. He sits straight up in the chair, his graying black hair combed back. His eyes soften. Like the sails on a boat, they offer a telltale sign of which way the wind is blowing and how strong. This afternoon, in the fading light of day, they tell me he is tired.
December 2003
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