Tag: Short Story

“On the walk home redwings shrill as you hum the “Bogoró ditse” (sixth movement, “Rejoice, O Virgin”), which starts in a slow, solemn whisper and then soars into an exalted alto duet. You would love to sing that duet, but Fred will recruit professionals. You altos joke that Rachmaninoff must have had an alto mistress, because the Vespers gives all the gorgeous melodies to them. The sopranos, who normally get all the gorgeous melodies, joke that they don’t mind being your accessories, but they do.
You tie your raincoat around your waist. The sticky things pull, which makes you hunch over, which makes you think about old age. A rare sunny day in a birdy wetland—at least you’ll be able to do this when you’re old. You think, I suppose it’s time to think about death.
And that’s enough of that.” 

“Say you thought you were pregnant. But you’re eighteen, newbie freshman on campus, hours from your boyfriend, hours from home. Wise enough to bring a couple of pregnancy tests with you to school, ones you made the boyfriend purchase at a drugstore miles from your hometown because, you know, people talk. But this is 1979, and those tests don’t work until you’re a few weeks along. It’s not like today, where you blink and find out you’re pregnant before you even miss a period. If you’re retro enough to still be menstruating.” 

“Then, when the black nightingale returns to the forest,
when the audacious sun is high,
I wonder, beneath the waves,
where a few more wing beats would have taken me”

“Trash-can colored and rusty, it was a car all throat,
all fits and stutters, a guttural language

choked at every breakneck shift of gears,
a devil’s-in-hell kind of loud, so buzz-saw loud

you could feel the fuel catch fire inside it, its inner life burning
with something I was too small to name.”

“It wasn’t until my fourth or fifth sip of tea this morning that I noticed Miss Nancy Carson was missing her eyebrows. I promptly set the cup down and stared at her across the breakfast table. I wanted to make certain she had not simply hidden her brows under too much white pomade. The girl is at an age where she has begun to prepare her toilette, and painting takes practice to master. But her brows were not covered up. They were gone.”

“I knew who Tim Davis was in high school, but I didn’t introduce myself to him until my mom ran him over with her car. And this is not some kind of “meet-cute” story, where her tires caught his foot as she slowly backed out at the grocery store or something. Rushing home on a drizzly November evening, from a place she should not have been, my mother mowed Tim down as he rode his bicycle to work, paralyzing him below the waist.”

“Today another patient
chokes: Don’t
let me die—

When her heart stops, there is so much
noise in the room—so many people
swarming, and then things
inserted—

Her legs jerk with every compression.”

“Dad and Mom got divorced two years ago. Mom says they split up because Dad is selfish and wants to sow his wild oats, two decades too late, and doesn’t want to be burdened by the demands of a family. Dad says they split up because of Sarah. Dad says that the death of a child strips the skin off a marriage, and if the bones underneath aren’t strong, everything falls apart.”

“Paper gowns are not as soft as cloth gowns are not as soft
as silk        as milk     which is only soft until it sours”

“In her old life, Grammy shelved books via the Dewey Decimal,
never imagined she would need a YouTube video on how to probe a vent.

So much science reduced to the withstanding of unease,
an ISA Brown hen upside down under her arm.”

“Two women in hijabs and abayas approach us. One of the women asks, ‘How long will this be going on?’ ‘It’s the community that’s doing this,’ Zenzele answers. ‘So, I guess, as long as the community keeps coming. This is all different people. There’s no one group organizing it.’ The draped women speak to one another in a language that sounds like the wind over the surface of water before they smile at us, nod, and walk on.”

“’Two weeks,’ Tamara echoes, like she’s mulling it over. Her legs are dangling over the arm of the chair. ‘Why don’t you just break up with him the normal way?’
‘Because that would require confrontation,’ I explain.
‘And knitting an entire sweater is easier than confrontation.’
‘Yes.’
Tamara turns to Lark for support, but he’s nodding solemnly. ‘Yeah, that holds up,’ he says.”