Somehow, my son finds a picture of my mum this week. It’s all such a long story, and it never really stops. Despite the fact that I shed people regularly, the way a snake sheds its skin. “You look just like her!” Django tells me, that laughter in his voice when he knows he’s found […]
While it’s true that Dad dying changed her life changed irrevocably, there was, long before that, the irrevocable changing of life anyway. It’s only now, in reaching an age he never attained, that she recognizes how simultaneously insubstantial and grandiose his existence. Insubstantial because of its disjointed structure. Brevity. Lacking the development of even one simple character […]
Around the age of 13 I was sent off to live with the Westons, the result of Mum deciding I was too much to handle. Which isn’t a slight to Mum. I actually was. Like, even for myself. I’d taken to hanging around with a strange group of friends. Strange in that they were kids, […]
The first day of 8th grade, Debbie and I make bets on who will lose her virginity. By choice, I mean, as opposed to the way we’ve had it. That weekend, I pass out at a party and when I come to I’m in the bathroom being fun-dipped by this older guy while my boyfriend pounds on […]
He says she’s guarded, that she’s got armor. But that doesn’t sound like her. Her words are more like . . . Poise. And subterfuge. She’s perched in his windowsill, writing. The house is old. It’s early morning and there is spring snow falling, uncertain in its descent. She left the house early for coffee. “Lie […]
It is mother’s day and I am maybe 12 or 13 or it doesn’t matter because one day it will all flow together and become indistinguishable anyway, and she has decided that I will be accompanying her to church. In the years leading up to this point, my father was still alive and the notions of my […]
“You might want to get in touch with your sister,” the email says. It’s from Mum, of course, and I know this despite her having another new last name. “You might want to get in touch with your sister.” Our first correspondence in eight or twelve or six hundred years. No signature. No subject header. […]
So it’s on Facebook this morning that I find out Stevan’s brother is dead. And it’s one of those moments that doesn’t make contact. I read the post several times, trying to make sense of it. But it’s too sudden and I’m not ready. I’m not ready for my childhood friend to have lost his brother. […]
Once, in a Proust Questionnaire, I was asked for my greatest accomplishment. “My brother,” I responded quickly, without thinking it through. I could tell by the looks on people’s faces that I’d gotten the answer wrong. I blushed, and it slowly dawned on me that another human being’s existence could probably not be my accomplishment. I mean, […]
The night that her stepfather bashed in her mum’s face, Delilah learned more about Ann Catherine than she did during the rest of their seventeen years together. Domestic violence is not always what you’d expect. And Delilah’s memory of sitting with her mum, staring at her colorful, swollen face, is oddly a sweet one. Husband […]
my delusions 