I walk our high school track under the noonday sun as young Carter the Punter goes about his ritual in the end zone 75 yards away. I work where Carter is a student and venture outside whenever possible, the mountain air has a way of breaking my fatigue. Carter talks to himself as he stretches; his voice resembles a muppet and carries well. In good and ill-tempered weather, he will be here with his duffle bag of tools: a small pump, ten footballs, exercise bands, two pairs of cleats, and a …

iii. When we arrived, my mother was already dead. The smell was antiseptic and my senses were overwhelmed by the acrid and the fluorescent, the sound of sneaker friction against worn floors, the collaborative din of life-supporting machines. I carried a box of new ballet slippers, tokens to carry me into summer camp. She was covered by a thin white sheet, face turned toward us, hollow human shell without the mother force thrumming things along. iii./v. The look of death is shared. Our unique …

We couldn’t find the labyrinth, which was maddening because I’d been there before and was convinced we were in the right place. Much of what I’d remembered seemed to have been drained or extracted from the scene. There was no more outrageous, biblical sea foam that had once claimed so much of the beach. The dozens of painstakingly stacked cairns previous wanderers had constructed for those after them had been disassembled or washed away. Most disconcerting was the total disappearance of the …

We met at the gentlemen’s club near Times Square with a dark, damp interior that imitated the color and heaviness of a black forest cake. I moved in a slow pull around the golden mini stage pole next to the V.I.P. lounge. I was there for the view of the man who had the entire section roped off. He sat, body like a soup dumpling, with dancers all around him, but his eyes were focused on me. As I stepped off the stage, he motioned for me, flicking the other girls off like gorged mosquitos. My …

One of the more unfortunate things I inherited from my ex was the desire for homeownership. In the early heady weeks of the relationship, as we stayed up all night in inexhaustible confession, he described at length his yearning for a home after he had split from his family, how he had traveled far and wide to find the house of his dreams, how much personal charm it had taken to nail the negotiation. What was more, it was set in a prime location in an up-and-coming city that would guarantee a …

Mulberries grow in deep pockets of my memories. The sepals turned fleshy and purple, tight as brains. As children, my brother and I made clubhouses in the mulberry shrubs on the campus where our father taught. Curtained and cool in the heat of the quad. My brother, who never made it out of childhood, believed the shrubs were time machines, taking us back to a time before sidewalks and cut lawns and flagpoles, before mail in the post office box and paninis at the campus cafe.  He’d push the …