Walking home around 4PM last fall, I spotted a can in the middle of the sidewalk. Strikingly silver and apparently full, since it wasn’t blown over. No logo, no nutrition facts, no label, only the reflected sun and these words, in shaky black Sharpie: CUM CAN, PLZ DRINK.
Read More2022 Four days after my wedding, my mother posts on a popular question-answer forum asking strangers to help her kill herself in our garage. Nathan and I are in Palm Springs, trying
Like a waiter reciting how the evening specials are prepared, a man in uniform announces, so that the eight of us can hear, that you are probably a man in your fifties,
Shock On Friday before Halloween weekend I was, at long last, pregnant. I’d taken the day off to prepare for my favorite holiday and to go to my first ultrasound appointment as
Apple peels curling pinkly on the kitchen table, their white meat tart and cold when I bit into their crescent shapes. Because I was five or six or seven even, I didn’t find
“It’s not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out the window.” —Wallace Stevens, Letters (1966) * * * “Where do you want the window?” Everett asks, standing on the unframed
Ryan and I had decided we were too old to be parents. We’d just met too late in life for this to happen, and the fiscal reality that we were teachers meant
this essay was first published in THE DEAD ARE GODS (Melville House, 2023) I am not really a believer. I suppose the best way to describe myself would be atheist, but then
Voronezh, Russia, 26 December 2018 When I got off the bus, my grandmother was there at the bus stop in her brown fur hat and long mink coat. She had owned them
I sit on the rough cement steps of a country convenience store, keeping an eye on Mom. She’s been on the phone for at least an hour. She has a pile of
What are your plans for Mother’s Day? Your question tightens my belly, squeezes my chest, constricts my throat. Your question leaves me gasping for words. Can you tell? When you ask it?