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still lives

The omen comes in the ruin of a robin’s egg on the sidewalk: fractured blue splattered with the pink makings of a flightless thing. A plum membrane of skin stretched over eyes like bruises. I make the mistake of looking back at this small disaster, and then the calamity of it fingers the threads of my morning.

Misunderstandings

Missed calls, misheard lyrics, mistaken identities

Transvestite Freak

Many confident, gorgeous men stare at me from the walls. They all seem to be wearing makeup. This is what a man can be too, I imagine them whispering. I’m nervous, but I want what they have.

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.

Fuel

Feeding the woodstove, siphoning gas with a hose, drinking endless cups of coffee

Sunbeams

Food has powers. It picks us up from our lonely corners and sits us back down, together. It pulls us out of ourselves, to the kitchen, to the table, to the diner down the block. At the same time, it draws us inward. Food is the keeper of our memories, connecting us with our pasts and with our people.

Jessica Fechtor

Shaving

A teenage rite of passage, a prison barber, a husband’s unfamiliar face

Compare and Contrast

I just read The Diary of Anne Frank, about a girl who hid from the Nazis. There are many similarities but also differences between us: When she started the diary, she was thirteen, and I will be thirteen in August. We are both girls, and, like her, I have many secrets and depressed emotions. I never hated my mom the way Anne hated hers, but last spring I came close.