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Physical Health
This Late Hour
She stopped taking the medicines when it had become clear they were no longer of any use. They had crowded her dreams with demons and angels from some nocturnal Disneyland. Now that she was done with them, her dreams were her own.
April 2009
All Of Me
No matter where I turned, there was food, leering, taunting: M&Ms wedged at the bottoms of pockets, cookies in the zippered compartment of my book bag, a pound of Twizzlers jammed into the medicine cabinet. I consumed it all fitfully, bulking up, belching, squirming, farting. My children joked that I carried spoons in my pocket in case soup rained from the sky.
March 2009
Survival Guide
Venom travels through your circulatory system, burning blood-vessel walls like acid as it goes, so the slower you can get your blood to flow, the better. Knowing this, I did not try to walk to our car, just ten yards away. Don ran to the house for the cellphone and the car keys. He brought the car to me, then called 911 as he drove, asking the dispatcher to have an ambulance meet us at the Bethlehem Fire Department, where there would be emergency medical equipment. Then I called Mama to tell her what had happened.
June 2008
The Empathic
I no longer felt I had to “let go” of my first family, as some had counseled. I had two daughters, one I held in my arms and one I held in my memory, but both were equally real. In this new present I could remember and cherish Doria without pain. Feeding Laura in her highchair, I told her that Doria had opened her mouth the same way, like a baby bird.
February 2008
The First Cut
I was raised in a family of four girls. When my sisters and I are together, we speak a private language composed largely of different pitches of laughter that causes our exasperated father to demand to know what’s so funny. I am most at home when I am sharing clothes, secrets, and a bathroom with other women.
February 2008
The Stain On The Sky
When my father was in his sixties, his retinas slipped their moorings. He told me he often dreamed of the brightly colored world. In the dark of night, asleep, he could see the blue water of Menemsha Pond and the white sails of his boat. But when he woke in the morning and opened his eyes, he was blind.
August 2007
Fat Pride
On this particular day in 1987, as I bicycled home from the student rec center, no one mooed at me. Mooers seemed to have grown scarcer than they’d been in my fat years as a teenager, despite the fact that I was now even bigger than that and went outside more frequently.
July 2007
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