I was perched, fully clothed, on Erich Honecker’s toilet seat, hoping for the night to end. My friend Isa was turning fifty and she’d invited every Berliner of her acquaintance from the over three decades she’d lived in the city to her...
We don’t exist in a soup of probabilities. We each carve a narrow path through the breadth of the possible—the sum of all choices we’ve made and all that were made for us.
I spent my seventy-first birthday driving an hour from our home in rural Tennessee and sitting for six hours in and around the Murfreesboro Medical Center while my wife, Erin, had four toes on her left foot operated on. The right foot was...
Among tall silver birches. Dogs yipping beyond the timberline. In my bag, a clementine for us to split. The river’s image trembles as you dip your foot in, raking the pebbles back and forth till silt rises to the surface.
Back then, I spent my hours at church studying the trails of His varnished blood and the seepage of His emaciated gut. The crucifix hung high above the celebrant’s chair, and the ribs looked so sharp they could cut.
