…will be reading a book or newspaper and will not tilt your head to look up as you ask this. Seconds, a minute, minutes will pass. I didn’t know I made you feel that way, they will respond and reach out their hand to touch the nape of your neck or thigh or belly. Their hand will not make it… [Read More]

…home shelters Alzheimer’s patients, who tend to wander. A resident might follow a departing visitor out the locked doors, then make her way onto the grounds of the adjacent residential community and along a country road. “Dr. Hunt” must be code: a way to initiate a search without causing alarm. Still, I loved my mistaken reading, and until my last… [Read More]

…at the time, that is to say — he never was and never could be wrong. However, from my parents’ whispered conversations behind half-closed doors, their meaningful sidelong glances and eye-rolls at the Pravda-reading Grandfather — and from the certain sotto voce exchanges between the stern-looking, poorly shaven city strangers milling around the Roshchino park in the dark — I… [Read More]

…we’re reading braille or something. It’s weird, Steph. It’s something. And I say, ‘Mom, what’s that old black guy doing in there?’” “He got a name?” “Who?” “I’m just tired of hearing you call him ‘this old black guy’ or ‘that old black guy.’” “What is it anyhow about that fella you were watching? He got you all worked up?”… [Read More]

…Prevent AIDS. It changed how I thought about pedagogy. We could use AIDS awareness to practice reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills, and we could use English to explore the stigma surrounding AIDS, dispel myths, discuss why people have sex, and learn how some HIV-positive people have accepted their status. Getting tested was a common motif in the texts and… [Read More]

…it’s too far to walk just to sit on a blanket. The people reading in chairs tire me too — How do they manage to be so relaxed? Does it require a lifetime of practice? — while the whiteness of vans in the sun echoes through the parking lot. Those lines in the lawn become wavy near the lot. As… [Read More]

…legs forced inside a skirt, she deflected every semantic trap the inquisitors set for her. I sat in the library reading biographies—what could I do? I didn’t know why Vaseline was funny; that rubbers were a kind of shoe. This morning, however, wasn’t it you who stopped me on the street to say the color of my dress was holy?… [Read More]

…thought of her in her flannel nightgown, stacking the cushions on the floor and pulling out the sofa bed, of the dusty old blankets he remembered from his own childhood, her scratched reading glasses and pill bottles on the cluttered end table — the whole picture filled him with shame. *** Helena had spent a week removing the old shingles… [Read More]

…but she didn’t turn for home. In a bit, she told the baby, we’ll go home in a bit. An old woman was sitting on the park bench throwing bits of bread to a few pigeons. Willa had seen her there before, sometimes asleep, sometimes reading a dime store paperback, but mostly, she sat and fed whatever birds happened to… [Read More]

…of Milton Hershey. I imagine a Cuban orphan getting trained for the job that killed his father. I imagine Kitty getting so fed up with the water spray she demands her fountain run on chocolate instead. I imagine millions of candy bars shipped across the nation, rattling in their wrappers, each one packaged with a paper slip reading: Pleas Hellp…. [Read More]

…ass, Seeing as how she never wore panties; Beaten at last, bloodied tooth and nail, he crawled Back to his room with her smells all over him. He dreaded the pale Sundays of December, Perched on a stool, hair plastered to his head with oil, Reading the cabbage leaves of the family Bible; Every night in bed his dreams oppressed… [Read More]

…other families that had endured the same kind of grief we had long buried. After two months of intense research and reading, I was left with a sense of malaise. I had trouble concentrating at work and snapped at coworkers. I was impatient with my husband. I was filled with questions that could never be answered by newspaper articles or… [Read More]