My daughter throws up once or twice a day opening mouth then hands as if to pour out what was once clenched. Throws up pillows, backpacks, and refrigerators. Builds a version of our cat from pretend vomit, builds a version of our kitchen. I worry
If there was a shack by the side of the river, what would it look like? How big would it be? If we opened the door to the shack by the river, what would we find there? There’s no light in the shack except light that eats through the gaps and the cracks in the day, but now it is night.
I found a black snake on the porch, its body so still I didn’t dare breathe. Lungs arrested, I might have left my body then. It was long, a rope I could Double Dutch, a tilde underneath every word I try to love differently.
Claire was coming over with her boyfriend—her partner—and Joan was baking mince pies in preparation, though she couldn’t remember whether Claire liked mince pies. It was difficult to keep everything straight with four children who changed their [...]
It was only a beer bottle I found in the middle of the trail, but it pinged an impulse in me to go. Get back to the car, give up our Saturday hike. I didn’t tell Cheryl, who stood by while I picked up the bottle and knocked off the dust. She’s known me for thirty years, since our kids were babies, and mostly she endures my jumpy nervousness. But a single empty beer bottle in the big, wide open of Oregon on a sunny June day—it was silly, even for me, to get worked up over such a thing.
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