In the morning, we friends gather on Zoom, collecting on a screen the way we once surrounded coffee shop tables, dropping handbags on the floor, dragging over extra chairs, only now new windows open into presence in front of us like blinking eyes, and here I sit at home with my wet-from-the-shower hair, and we […]

“The way the game works,” Zoe says, sitting across the table and all that history, tossing a deck of playing cards back and forth loosely in her hands, “is that you don’t get to know the rules. You have to figure them out as you play.” She and her friend exchange a glance, and friend […]

When we round the corner, she gets up from where she sits, pushing open the door.  I can see the cold, straight legs of a card table through a narrow opening; I can tell she has hair the color of straw, that she wears a rose-colored shirt.  Even before she stands in the doorway holding […]

In that house on the hill, someone shouts so loud the windows rattle, brittle and tinkling, like chains.  In horror films, that sound–always the glass clattering like shivering teeth–makes me want to hide my face.  My steps slow as I pass by, a rumbling street and a sidewalk between.  “I told YOU,” I hear a […]

They are inside the gas station maybe 5 minutes.  The girls and I wander in while father and son linger at the pump, and then they follow us in, more efficient, by far, than we.  Early morning, and ours is the only vehicle left at at least eight nozzles, though the three dusty spaces beside […]

I just want to feel better, she says, looking at me with those eyes–wide, blue like crisp Fall; those eyes that still say Mom, fix this, please, even though we’re both well past the point of believing I could actually do that. Her bookbag thunks to the floor and she tugs at her skinny jeans, […]

Travel weary and temporarily keyless, we knock, feeling as dusty as the door, as parched as the plants.  I run my thumb along the delicate thinning edge of a swooping leaf, crisp and browned, like old parchment.  On the door, the vinyl letters have broken in places and begun to curl away, even as they still […]

There’s only ever been one perfect love; only one that didn’t come out all lopsided, with smudges all over the edges. Time races up behind me and I have no choice but to microwave the butter I forgot to take out ahead.  I need it to cream, and ice-cold butter doesn’t cream.  I unfold the […]

Today, this extravagant Gift: Gently, he traces my cheekbone with the edge of his thumb, just lightly.  It is a simple, wordless gesture, so powerfully warm as to thaw the edges of the day. “I know,” I say, “I have a nasty bump there,” thinking immediately of the blemish on my cheek, red and tender […]

The look on his face is stern as we approach, as though he knows already that there’s something suspiciously wrong about us.  I smile, because I’m pretty sure what he does must be tiring. He must have seen all kinds of things from that perch, watching the hundreds of us file through like worn mules […]