I drive out Old Frankfort Pike past the ditch by the creek where you pulled off on New Year’s Day to pick from the mud that Jack Russell with swollen nipples and bring her back to the farm.
Sommy notices his legs first, hairy and stumpy, the part not covered by his tan-colored shorts. He’s standing by the airport’s exit, watching a woman on tiptoes, a piece of cardboard held above her head. His name is Bayo, Sommy’s new...
Yesterday, my son taught me the sign for lockdown— different than locking a door, or the shutdown we invented at the start of the pandemic. Little fistfuls of locks swept quickly between us, a sign designed especially for school.
Katie said they were nettles and I guess she was right. I think they’re very pretty—taller than I am, thin-throated and headed with a pink bulb made of linear petals. I don’t know what they feel like, though I’ve wanted to touch.
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...
