I remember what my grandmother has long forgotten. She was an integral part of my childhood, yet she doesn’t recognize my name. Details of her own upbringing she recalls perfectly—that she grew up on a cattle farm in Wyoming and used to fall asleep on the porch gazing at
Linda’s first mistake was getting lost inside an IKEA. Her second was thinking she could run. The Swedish meatballs she had eaten hours before made her sluggish and easy to track through the aisles as the fluorescent lighting shone down like a searchlight. Her footsteps rang out on the cold laminate as she passed through... Continue Reading →
News: High School Shooting Claims Twelve 1. (at 24) We’re sitting on the steps in the dark watching the storm come and the wind gusts and the cool air touches my skin and it smells of water and the tree leaves on the big oak ripple like green waves and the undersides of the clouds flash... Continue Reading →
When the first truck hit Nevin’s dog, the howls echoed off the brick walls of First United Methodist Church. It was in March in the East End where snow piled on the corners higher than the first story of our house. The depth of ice on the lake measured in feet. Coal soot sat on... Continue Reading →
If you work at a cat shelter, you will cry. You may be the toughest feral who ever gnawed leather. You may be a flannel anarchist who spray-paints the words “eating animals” on STOP signs. You may be a failed pastor whose Master of Divinity gets a laugh in this particular sanctuary. However you got... Continue Reading →
I wonder if they write stories at the Church of God’s Love. How do they remember the hobos who rode along? It’s hard to scrape up a paragraph for the tumbleweed. The person who visits once, scarcely denting the pew, is a mystery. Perhaps his church was closed for stinkbug removal. He may be a... Continue Reading →
I sat staring at the tiny squares of the pee-stained tile floor, marveling at the idiocy of designing a high school bathroom floor using grout that essentially guaranteed a permanent record of the DNA of every student that unzipped and let loose in this stall. The smug engineers even put tile on the walls, confident... Continue Reading →
I knew bad things would happen to me the day I hit a red Volkswagen in Reynosa and drove away. A young woman with gorgeous blonde curls hopped out of her Passat and rushed to the back of her car, distressed, nearly catching her long straight pants in her heels. Probably on her way to... Continue Reading →
Every kind of car whizzes past me. The roar of the tires on asphalt is deafening. A trackhoe’s track grinds somewhere in the blurry distance. I edge closer to the concrete rail seeking shelter as if that will glue back together my broken ligaments. I don’t think the shock has worn off yet. But, God!... Continue Reading →
I never thought my greatest nemesis would be a goose outside the office door, waiting, plotting the moment it would strike . . . again. She never attacked anyone else. Only me. The bruises on my ankles from last time had just begun to fade, and here she was, right on time for a new... Continue Reading →
