December 2020 A (Day 2)

I catch her in the bathroom mirror, after a double shift. Her face a glossy pearl through the fog of shower glass. She’s prettier than me, meaner than me. Seems taller than me. She asks, what is the use? After I wash my tired face, she’s gone. At the movies, in the...

My best friend Jordan was a Liverpool FC fan. The club went thirty years without winning a title – longer than Jordan was on this Earth. Growing up, I used to take great pleasure in reminding him how awful at football Liverpool were. Jordan was bigger and more popular...

We left my mother's ashes in a crypt in a city she hated. Dead is dead, we said. A bunch of years later, I was coming out of a latrine with my toddlers and there she was. A wisp walking across the dunes toward the lake. Stopped me dead in my tracks. Had to shake it...

A voice is speaking on the other end when she scowls and hucks her phone into an unruly boxwood. An explosion of sparrows billows up yelling fuck you! in chorus, then races back down to the center of the shrub. She heads up the driveway, peering at the phone casually...

Since you died I’ve been writing to your son. In my head mostly, while running climbing lathering the dishes you pop up and I think well all I can do is write to him because he’s alive and you aren’t and maybe he’d want what I know of you even though his father might...

I’ve called in sick again. My boss didn’t bother reply to my text message this time. Not even with a K. I’ve spent the morning hours on the couch in my apartment, drinking the last of the red wine left behind after my sister’s baby shower. I sit with my computer on my...

There’s a Tupperware crisis in this country And you can make a grocery list of the substances in your body. Name brand Adderall and an SSRI 60 milligrams. Two fat burners because you want to eat a cinnamon roll with your coffee, the one with the orange icing. Creatine...

It had been a month since any of us had heard from Melanie. Her sister was ill, cancer at 42, but she had been dying all year, and we were sure nothing had changed. We knew she was struggling at work, but then she always was. Melanie disappeared a lot, and so it was...

Ambrotypes My skin is sepia now. I crawl into bed next to my pilot husband that didn’t come back from his sky mission.  *** When I was a kid, I was scared a black hole might appear like a L’Engle portal. I wanted to go to Space Camp but only with Lea Thompson and...

I met Gwen after a hard right swipe on Tinder.  Through Gwen I met Wren. Gwen and Wren live above and below each other in an overflowing apartment building four blocks from my home.  Wren and I decide to go to the beach. I call up Dinah as I walk to Wren’s and invite...