I crossed streets to find a grocery store, all the while imagining myself slipping in front of an oncoming truck. I wiped snow out of my eyes with tears, thinking at least that way my mother would never have to know about the forty days.
I’m not very good at meeting famous people.
Which was better: fishing with my grandfather or fishing with my grandson? I spent blissful days devoting all my spare neurons to contemplating the question, aided by the occasional mug of Laphroaig.
I am grateful for the distance between my home in Oregon and his delusions in Idaho.
I’d never imagined that being a caregiver would encourage me to be such a liar, but I find I’m quite good at it.
… it’s the only place I could find diesel, standing in a sweatshirt when it’s thirty below, standing there without gloves on and pumping the fuel into a red gasoline jug.
Mother had developed her muscles in red tasseled boots as the majorette for her high school band and lifting heavy trays in her parents’ restaurant. Lucretia developed hers picking cotton and carrying firewood.
My father is frozen in space, iced over, and I wonder what happens inside of him, where the blood still runs warm.
Dressed in July in a three-piece suit no longer in fashion even in the Old Country, my great uncle simply shuffled, hardly pausing, from one painting to the next while muttering the painter’s name.
The door to her two-and-a-half rooms had been left unlocked in the night, and someone had left a crisp brown grocery sack beside her bed.
