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Isabela’s Red Dress Flutters Away

September 11, 2023

For LaurenThe other teachers warned you: She will curse you out. She said: I thought  you would be just another white bitch, but you’re not. You heard Isabela improvise a bilingual trumpet solo of obscenities to blast the faces of the boys ci [...]

Two Ambulances

In July 2021, five weeks after my mother died, my husband dropped me off at the emergency room of the small hospital in the Massachusetts town where my father now lived alone.

The Realm of Possibility


“I have to do the wee,” announced the child.

“You have to make a wee,” her mother said. “And I asked you before we got in the car, remember? It’s too late for that now. You can go at the gym.”

“I have to do the wee,” the child repeated.

Illustration by Anna Schuleit Haber

Renovation

Water, I learned, was the most abundant element in nature whose only value came from controlled and measured distribution. Our lives invariably revolved around its input and output, and the same rules which governed the natural world were also true for our family’s own ecosystem.