The water spilled over the rim, hissing on the stove, making a mess the way things do when no one is watching. I turned down the flame, wiped the counter, and cleaned what could be cleaned. The bubbles subsided.…
As a lawyer with plenty of life experience, my mother should have known that lizards were a bad choice. Lizards are pets you cannot even pet. Touching them opens the risk of salmonella or something more sinister. Picking up…
He drove a semi for the carnival, age sixteen, carrying transformers, his the bright yellow of the Zipper; he drove each Sunday to a new destination, driving all night, driving fast, driving on speed, driving on amphetamines, and then…
Two thousand, four hundred, twenty-nine texts. Over the course of 625 days, I exchange 2,429 texts with my boss, Will. For the first 149 days, 88 percent of our texts are work-related. Like the twenty texts between us about…
My youngest brother runs away from home again the morning the baby robins fly from the nest. All spring, I watch a mother robin build her nest under my deck. It rests next to the half-dozen hollowed-out husks abandoned…
What did I know of being a man, back in another century, as I sat in that bar off Massachusetts Avenue, with the older men talking about the Red Sox, and so-and-so’s wife passed on, the saint she was,…
It was a hot August morning in 2017 when I finished packing everything I cared to keep into my blue Forester (including cat, dog, and the few boxes of things I hadn’t sold or given away) and left Milwaukee.…
I. He tells me my body is deteriorating. Just like that. He says, “Your body is deteriorating.” Part 1 of me says Fuck you. Part 2 of me weeps. II. We’re fighting about sunflowers again. Or maybe the…
Pilgrims We stumble through the door of our new Florida home at two in the morning, doubled over from exhaustion. My father and grandpa follow closely behind, parking the U-Haul down the street. That makes seven of us in…
The floodlights we found under my father’s workbench. I didn’t want to cut chemistry for the fourth time in two weeks, but Lee was the boss. Lee was Freddie Mercury, and I was only Brian May playing a tennis…
