The morning I left him, I unrolled reams of toilet paper; it lay in soft defiance on the bathroom floor. He hated that. How many times do I have to tell you not to let the toilet paper touch the floor?
His sister, meanwhile, couldn’t believe it. What kind of woman leaves her husband after forty-six years of marriage?
A question unanswerable back then. I was too focused on …
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It’s 9:00 AM on a Monday morning in the Village. I’m on the fifth floor of Joffrey studios and I’m standing at the barre. My left hand just touches the wood railing and my right foot is extended in front of my nose. Stravinsky’s Les Cinq Doigts moderato spills from the grand piano at the front of the studio and I’m acutely focused on counting …
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Sitting cross-legged on the guestroom daybed, Aunt Diana looked a bit like her namesake goddess. She had unbuttoned the top of her blouse so that the white parted like a soft curtain revealing her breast, infant cousin Will’s mouth molding so tightly to her nipple, it formed a rosy entity. I had wandered away from my parent’s dinner party, a curious toddler wondering where her …
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The First
I really need to choose one specific day every week to wash my clothes.
My current method hails from the world-renowned
“Wait until you have nothing left to wear but one dirty towel” School of Laundry.
I had to heap everything into the basket with my hair still wet from the shower.
The Second
At …
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I saunter slowly through the aisles of annuals and poppies, past flowering cacti and tiny Christmas trees following Michaelene in the Lowe’s Garden Center on a Friday night. It’s already dark, the cold wind swimming. Michaelene reaches an arm, long and slender, to touch the needly leaves.
“I want a live one,” she says. “Not one that’s dead.”
I follow her through the shadows, the unlit areas …
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