Fixer Upper I’ve always felt a need to be a fixer. When I was young, and my father an alcoholic, I went to the library and discovered that making meals with carbohydrates would lessen the desire to drink. I made lots of spaghetti. Huge bowls of mashed potatoes. Freshly baked cookies. Then he wouldn’t come home for supper. Later, I’d hear him stumble home late at night, almost morning, puking in the bathroom, cursing up the stairs as he stumbled to bed. Finding apricot pits to cure Mom’s …

When I was a child, I swallowed a bite of fried catfish whole. A reckless pluck of my chopsticks in a hungry and juvenile daze. It was momentarily joyous — the taste of hot salt, of nước mắm and crunchy fish skin, the fat faltering under the snap of my teeth before it melted in my mouth. Then, I choked. A barb of bone, I’m sure no bigger than my thumb, lodged itself in my throat. I panicked, staring at my mother across the table. There was a messy string of Việt and hasty shakes of the head …

Stone 1 The day hope died a burden was lifted. Al -Yahud’s ropes were untied. A sack of golden bangles, clay tablets and unleavened Babylonian bread, khubz fatir, fell to the bottom of the river — flat bread carries no joy. This is why my grandparents are silent. Their history dumped in the river. This is why I dive in, seeking what’s at the bottom of the riverbed, find the turban of the chief rabbi, Chacham Bashi Moshe, unravelling in my DNA; gravel and clay remnants I add to my …

after a line by Hafizah Geter January. You left your apartment in Cincinnati—all that light, its wide windows, its clean kitchen, its full-belly fridge—and met me halfway up Route 27. It was night by then, and I drove down from Oxford, leaving my place—its hollow door, empty cupboard, matted shag carpet. The road was two-lane, and we must have each pulled off to the side, and I must have gotten in your car. Like so much of the year I was twenty-seven, that part is hazy. You kept the heat on …

I pull the clipboard off the dash. On the work order, in blue ballpoint, is: One room, no stairs. A 20-minute job I’ll pad to an hour.  I back the van out of the shop and turn up the radio — Dr. Laura is on a commercial break. When she comes back, she takes a call from a man who complains that his 19-year-old son runs around with friends and won’t get a job or go to college. Males have a harder time growing into men than girls have growing into women, Dr. Laura says. She tells a story …

There are moose tracks on the snow outside the Grand Hotel Saltsjöbaden. The tracks hold pieces of the animal left behind, a tuft of hide, the strength of the animal here, the shadow of it there. I’ve seen moose in Idaho but never in Sweden. There is a moose hide in my parents' Idaho barn. My brother, living in the Alaskan bush, once killed a moose for the winter’s meat. The way the moose ambles along. The way moose legs look too spindly to carry such an enormous body. The unpredictability …