But You Didn’t
Was it terrible? That time in the tiny market across from St. Bartholomew’s, where kids would stop before school for Tastykake pies and licorice, the morning when you and Nick Cane, rushing into the store just minutes before the bell rang, found the owner stretched out on the floor behind …
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Summer of ’76
I love Ali MacGraw. I love her hair in the movie Love Story. Ma doesn’t. She accosts us―my friends and me―as we emerge from the theater that screens English movies. I’m in a celluloid trance as she grips my arm with her work-worn fingers and drags me home, where she …
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Home Schooling
cw: domestic abuse/neglect Desert Road, New Zealand. November 1985. Caoimhe Connelly was blithely unconcerned that her parents were waking two hundred odd miles north, asking where the hell has she gone this time? Jandals kicked off, feet on the dash, she read the DepEd leaflet (Home Schooling Curriculum) while …
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Set the City Spinning
The winter after I had my heart broken, I fell in love with the city. The sound of bike bells and dog barks and arguments and lust and longing and feet and tables and chairs scraping, spilling through walls and windows and ceilings every hour of every day, blanketing me …
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The Year of the Weight
When Navid Abhari was twelve, going to the movies meant parting ways in the theater lobby. He felt very strongly that the only way to watch a movie was among strangers. They would stand in line together to buy popcorn. Then, upon exiting the snack bar, he would say, “Well, …
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Brown-Eyed Recluse
Nine months after Isabelle’s husband left, Isabelle lay on her rumpled bedspread, feeling a rattling in her stomach, like a marble inside her. She drew a hand across her belly protectively and tried to think of what might satisfy the feeling; some toast and jam to start, perhaps. She counted …
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The Candy Bowl
The room whispered to Simon in its language of creaks and fluttering appliances. The small noises seemed to work in uneven patterns like an overheard conversation. It amused him to give substance to these inanimate dialogues and reminded him of the two little girls from the apartment down the hall …
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The Advantages of Being a Desk
–***** I began my day at the office, attempting to scooch so far into the desk that it would envelop me. Though I couldn’t imagine the entirety of the process, I was convinced the desk would look the way invasive vines look when they overtake a sidewalk, a street …
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Open House, Sunday 2-5 pm
It’s a quiet street. “Shoes off, please, or there are booties at the door.” We can’t leave a trace as we traipse through: archeologists in a ruin, projecting civilization into empty rooms. “It’s currently unoccupied,” says the listing agent, as a dozen people squeeze around her. The owners are abroad, …
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The Half-Life of Human Memory
Some health problems attack methodically — cancer, heart disease, the slow drain of the body’s vigor as it ages. But more worrisome are the unpredictable things that happen without warning, when hard luck and outside forces coauthor narratives of tragedy. There’s a reason I often walk the same route home. …
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