We aren’t supposed to go near the pit on burning days, but it’s never hard to figure out. Last week, for example. David Finster wasn’t at the bi-monthly beautification meeting to petition, yet again, for replacing grass with decomposed granite in public spaces, Christina Hotchkiss didn’t show up at the neighborhood potluck after promising to bring the “world’s best salad,” and Melanie Birch started coming out of her house alone in the morning, no longer needing to carpool with her …
Everything is the same on the way to school, the beard guy with his cardboard sign, the white-orange cat that’s weeks-long dead getting pressed deeper and deeper into the pavement from our tires, and Bailey’s stupid big-wheeled truck with its tattered flag sticking up out of the bed, the I’m a patriot stickers of guns plastered on his bumper. But your empty desk …
December is mango season, when sayaca tanagers peck holes and holes and holes. They flock to trees with northern exposure and gorge on the earliest ripened fruits, which hang motionless like sunkissed teardrops not quite sad enough to fall. One by one, however, eventually they drop—their fleshy, yellow …
My son returned a month after the funeral. He was sleeping sweetly in his bed. I wanted to wake him right away. I wanted to shake him gently and to hold him against my body, while telling him how much I had missed him and loved him. But I didn’t dare. What if he were actually dead, again? What if he vanished the second I touched him? I sat on the edge of his bed and looked at the crown of his head, where his hair swirled, at the backs of his stick-out ears, at the nape of his neck. The covers …
Once when I was seven, I locked myself in the bathroom because my brother was threatening to tie a firecracker to each of my wrists and explode me like a melon. It was my cousin Henry who knocked on the door and coaxed me out with a dollar bill. Look, he said, crumpling the bill in his fist. Now close your eyes. My mother always told me not to shut my eyes around a boy, not even my own cousins and uncles and especially not my grandfather, who once impregnated thirty girls and a herd of goats in …
This was August in Paris, by the Luxembourg Gardens, in the 6th, not that the garçon at Bistro Le Jardin expected the girl to know this, or to know that August in Paris did not properly belong to lovers and roses but to vagrants and pimps, blown plastic bags in the trees and the stench of rotting apple peels, out of season. He’d seen her come in yesterday with the famous painter, who probably did not expect to find his usual garçon aproned and ill-humored in the pit of summer. The girl – for she …