Broken Pool Noodle
I’m leaving my fourth and final IVF appointment. We have no more chances. Well, more accurately, we have no more money. And even though I would never tell my husband, I’m a little relieved. My abdomen feels foreign to me. It’s become a bruise factory over the last two years, …
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A dirge for a sound long unheard
I I write you a love poem in a language far removed from my own. With words I’d never utter for you to hear. When I read it for you, I replace five-syllabled words with memorized sounds. I want you to admire the poet. II You edit …
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A Matter of Being
Hair “Mastectomy?” Joe, my husband of forty-four years, says robotically. Dr. Robeson, the oncologist, describes to Joe how my breast cancer works, and I watch as Joe tries to uphold his Baptist deacon stature. I remember the day he said, “I do,” there was a similar wave of stiff astonishment …
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Birdboy
After you were made, the Earth requested your mother’s body. Your father said, “She never heard you cry twice”—and, though this never fell from his mouth, you could hear it clearly in the silence that followed—”You killed her. You took her from me.” Maybe it is why he named you …
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A Girl Walks Through a Mirror
On the last day of the shoot, she appears in just one scene, which might more accurately be referred to as a transition—a CGI bridge between reality and the Shapeshifter’s Lair, as the script describes it. Her role in this scene is considered central, for her character (a peculiar girl …
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A Girl Never Dies
It might be more appropriate to say that she dies a million times—each time in a different way or at a different point in her life. When she first realizes this is happening, she’s fifteen years old, a sophomore in high school, walking home with her best friend Vanessa after …
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Pretty Knotte
This evening I had a conversation with the editor—I will call her Jan—of a small but reasonably prestigious literary journal on the West Coast. At the time of this writing, I’m just a few months past my fiftieth birthday. A little Googling leads me to believe that Jan is in …
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Shelf Space
By the time I got down there, there were so many empty shelves in the Cape Coral house it looked like some beachy gift shop in foreclosure. My parents always planned to do Florida for retirement: a golf course, drives to the beach, Dine-N-Dance nights. Dad was fifty-five when he …
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Key Change
Buddy drives and I ride shotgun. We ride in a ramshackle van with busted fenders and peeling paint, the kind of vehicle that inspires parents to hold their kids tight when it staggers too close on the street. We are driving up the coast and the ocean is wide and …
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If We Clean, We Clean Each Other
You did an admirable job trying to hide your surprise when you opened the door and saw me standing there; most people blinked and glared or smiled too widely, looking like they’d lost their minds and were thinking of all the ways they’d like to murder me. But despite your …
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