The first time she met her mother-in-law, my mom committed a faux pas that still makes her cringe. My grandmother, Anna, dropped a piece of Wedgwood—sky-blue stoneware, neoclassical designs—into Mom’s lap as they sat together in what working-class Philadelphians called the “pahlor.” Mom gushed her thanks, only to realize years later that the vase hadn’t …
One August Thursday morning, shortly after my sister, Amanda, turned twenty, I steered our blue Volkswagen into the foothills of the Allegheny National Forest. The clouds hung low, the air milky: a beautiful day in northwest Pennsylvania. I’d planned an excursion into the wilderness, just the two of us, to be followed by cheeseburgers at …
my best friend chenay is afraid of heights. she swears humans only have bones just to anchor us to the ground. otherwise—we’d all float up to the sky, graveyard. that’s why she’s on her ass right now, denim shorts traveling across gravel & dirt, moving about five centimeters a minute, as we descend a windy …
according to late-night-sofa stories, when my mom & dad were getting a divorce, my dad hid all five of us kids from our mom, for two whole weeks. my mom was said to be running around with a sunburned man, getting high on moonlit drugs, & forgetting she was a mother. i was still fresh …
I Last week I stuck my son in the scalp with a sewing pin. He did not scream. He did not cry. He said, What was that thing, Mama? The boy sat with me at the table, in my lap, and I hunched around him, patching over the couch’s slipcover with navy pinstripe wool. It …
“I’m not looking forward to taking out the trash in this heat,” said Cedric as he tied the full bags closed, hoisted them out of the cans, placed them on the dolly, and got ready to head into the dense August St. Louis night. “Working in a restaurant kitchen is a tough job for someone …
Since April 2017, the first anniversary of my foster brother’s death, I’ve opened my Schirmer’s edition of Beethoven’s complete sonatas and sat at the piano for half of each day, replaying songs I’ve known since I was a child. I repeat the ritual two to five times a year, during important dates of our relationship. …
I am sleeping when the pain starts, dreaming of full hospitals and empty classrooms, a dark tunnel, dates on a computer screen, a diminishing roster of students, dead links, a riot of wildflowers—yellow to orange to code red—a superbloom of fires. My body jerks. My eyes open in the dark, and I am sucking air. …
“Ntxawm.” The harsh monosyllabic sound startles you. It’s midsemester, and you still hesitate to answer when your professor says it—though you are the one who asked him to use this name. It should be normal in this setting: in this Hmong language class, full of other Hmong students, your name is the most ordinary one—but …
for my brother, David, who has been lucky enough to be loved by many I One of the unforeseen outcomes of my mother’s death in my senior year of college was the A-plus I earned on the final project in my Editing and Publishing class at the University of Nevada. The assignment was to self-publish …