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Death
The Jump
My six-year-old came out of his room the other morning wearing eyeglasses with no lenses. The frames were the same pillow shape as his mother’s, though hers were apricot colored, and these were a red tortoiseshell like a movie star might wear. He must have gotten them from Mrs. Dugan, who watches him during the summer while I’m at work.
October 2008
Finding Out
Cross-dressing, a lifelong eating disorder, the dazzling white image of life
October 2008
The Things We Say When We Say Goodbye
There was a point, during the disaster, when everybody thought that the hurricane had passed and the worst was over. Then the levees broke — not from storm surge, engineers now think, but because the soil beneath the concrete walls was too weak. Nobody was there to help when the water started rising — a foot a minute in some places, I’ve been told.
September 2008
The Right Wind
You’ve heard the old lovers’ cliché: “I don’t know where you end and I begin”? I don’t buy it. When my husband’s life ended — that’s when I didn’t know where mine began.
July 2008
Baton Rouge
It was hot and I wanted to die, in a way. I was tired of being twenty-five years old and festering as an undergraduate at one of the largest cow colleges in the deep South.
July 2008
Love At The Gun Runner
At the edge of town in Merced, California, sits a pale building whose sign says, “The Gun Runner.” A shooting range and retail outlet for rifles, pistols, and any kind of bullet you might need, it is owned and operated by Sandy, a friend of my family’s and the only true psychic I know. Her husband, Gary, whom I’ve never met, helps her run the place. I haven’t seen Sandy for years, not since my father died and she came to the funeral to tell my mother, my siblings, and me what Dad wanted her to communicate: that he had passed over and was filled with love for us and awe at life’s immensity and regret over whatever hurt his depression might have caused everyone. We trusted Sandy and always welcomed her glimpses into the “other side.”
June 2008
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