My mother needed help getting out of the bathtub. I had never seen my mother’s body bare. I sometimes saw her in her white bra and white underpants, big white underpants spread to dry across the clothesline like a row of unfolded paper doll cutouts. She didn’t hide her body when I came to help her. Her stomach was crisscrossed… Read more →
Friday night, my wife calls me at school and says she has food poisoning. I can hear the crack in her voice, so I drive home, imagine a weekend juggling two kids under two while she’s holed up in the john. When I arrive, she is hunched over in pain and says she needs to lie down. I hold our… Read more →
The first execution by electric chair was a result of rivalry. Thomas Edison suggested the best way to produce instantaneous death by electricity was to use the alternating current electricity of his opposition, George Westinghouse, not the direct current electricity Edison used in his own street-lighting projects. Surely, he argued, alternating current electricity was more dangerous, and therefore should be… Read more →
The cabinet for the game is a large imposing thing when you are young—a television screen larger than the one you have in the comfort of your own home, yourself on the tips of your toes so that you can reach the controls. When the game is released you are nine-years-old. You are big for your age. You already know… Read more →
She sits just to the left of me in the living room of our apartment, her face flashing in sync with the images on the television in front of us. She’s watching the flat screen from her favorite chair, a mid-century modern piece with sleek lines made from American walnut and full grain leather. She’s pulled a plush white blanket… Read more →
I could die today, if I wished, merely by making a little effort, if I could wish, if I could make an effort. —Malone Dies One of my aims is to understand what it is (or what the its are) about certain men that I admire and fear, but I won’t name names. I know who these men are while you’re abandoned (assuming… Read more →
The tent is set up. I’ve checked twice to make sure the kayak is secure. I’ve eaten soup and carrot sticks and an apple and rinsed the pot. For the first time since five this morning when I hefted a bag onto the handle of my wheelchair and my hand gripped the front door knob and hesitated, I stop plotting… Read more →
When you were six you stole money from your father’s wallet and nobody has talked of it since. His brown wallet, the only one you’ve ever known, with frayed edges with no hanging strings (he picks them off), the panels intact and smooth from friction with his back pocket. You would slide and crumple bills from the wallet when he… Read more →
Let us not blame ourselves. It is human nature to struggle against our urges, dissect them, and at the end of the day we must be compassionate. We have only to look at history to see a record of how our personalities have bloomed and shown their colors by the things once buried with us (see ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIA). There is… Read more →
I. Lodging A neighborhood of vinyl-clad double-wides; a crop-dusting prop plane sweeps corn and soy. A woman walks by and asks if I own the home. She’s from farm country too—a lush rolling plain of corn fields that smell sweet in late summer. Rootless transplants from Philadelphia, Wilmington, Jersey, and Dover have settled this driftwood spit. We both come from… Read more →