When my mom died my sister was on her first vacation without the kids. I didn’t know what to do, so I kept everything the same.
My sister had gone to the beach for a peaceful yet rambunctious long weekend with her girlfriends. Four busy women got their schedules and sitters to align and declared they deserved a break. They deserved to be the only ones with needs for a few glorious days. I couldn’t have called screaming just as they put their luggage on freshly made hotel beds.
My sister and I always email pictures of our trips to our mother. We could be finishing up a 14 mile hike at the bottom of the earth and we can’t wait to get wifi and email our mom all about it.…
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The earliest of my drawings that live in my mother’s mental Proof of Nicole’s Childhood Brilliance collection include crooked crayon stick figures depicting my mom (with a long Raw Umber-colored hair flip), my brother (short Maize fringe), me (Lemon Yellow shoulder-length bob), my cat Caesar (Peach fur)—and my imaginary friend Mona (Violet-Red corkscrew curls with metallic Silver fingers). Those silver fingers? Knives. Yes, I palled around with an invisible girl with knives for fingers when I was five years old. And one of my earliest memories of my father—perhaps the only good memory of him that I possess—is him bundling my mother, brother, and I into the back of his black van and taking us to see The Exorcist when I was around the same age.…
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‘There used to be a house here,’ Mama said, pointing at the small shop that now sells vegetables and fruit.
‘When?’ Arjuna scoffed. ‘When you were a child?’
‘Yes,’ said Mama, glaring at him. ‘Which was only about thirty years ago!’
‘Only!’ Arjuna said, clutching at his forehead and staggering into the path of an oncoming trishaw.
I shoved him out of the way and the trishaw man glared at him, blaring his horn at the same time for dramatic effect.
‘I need to buy some veggies. Come on.’ Mama crossed the road in front of yet another trishaw and went inside the small shop. We followed reluctantly. Coming out of the hot December sun into the darkness of the shop, I felt claustrophobic. The fruits all smelled extremely sweet and I could see flies buzzing around a papaw that looked ever so slightly off.…
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I am the bug finder. With the sow-bugs, jooper beetles, nightcrawlers, and dead bumble bees I find, I’ll catch the biggest fish my father has ever seen. We’ll eat it for dinner and everyone’s bellies will be full. I turn over stones and check the wet mud for the worms. The cinder blocks in the garden bed are best, but I wait until Mom is on the phone to turn them over. Then I place them black carefully so she won’t know. I don’t think, when she sees the fish I’ll bring home, that she’ll mind me turning up the wall of her garden bed. I’ve got my pole ready by the door and I’m full of energy because today is a good day for bug finding.…
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Driving home from my parent’s house
On Father’s Day. Feeling guilty
For almost hugging him—for
Touching his arm instead. We sit
Outside while my brother cooks
Hamburgers and my nephew
Enjoys his new BB gun. An
Extended family of flies
Lands, two at a time, on every
Surface—even the barrel. We
Wave them away until our arms
Get tired. Mom sits across from
Me and she points over my
Shoulder at the solitary
Crow perched in a cypress tree.
He’ll be here long after we’re gone,
She says, and I notice she keeps
Her inhaler close at hand now.
It’s my security blanket,
She says. I worry about her
More now. And I don’t know what to
Say when my brother finally
Embraces her.
– Jason M.…
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Jeff Goldblum was maddening. Mitzy lay in bed, naked to the ceiling fan’s rotations, sweat beading on her cleavage, her stomach, everything. Jeff would not take his eyes off her, that stare so moody, so dark, just like Jurassic Park.
“What are you going to do to me, Goldblum.” She parted her dry lips.
The dark philosopher would not reply, just hummed under his breath. Why anybody paid to watch him front the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, she couldn’t imagine. No musical talent. Just an atonal whine. No, his talents lay elsewhere and were of the pectoral variety.
How she had ended up here, trapped in her bed, held hostage by this handsome fiend she didn’t know, except she never should’ve had drinks with that man last week, the one whose Tinder profile said he was an electrician.…
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My father never spends money without purpose. If a selfless father purchases extra pastries for his daughter’s enjoyment, buys instruments to gift his daughter the wonders of music, encourages his daughter to earn decent grades so she can achieve her dream job, or pays his daughter’s tuition for the fun of attending a prestigious school, then my father is not a selfless father. Rather, my father lives with a selfish investment in the cultural expectation of filial piety.
Before high school, I attended Carmel Valley Middle School—a campus littered with scabs of gum stuck to the cement grounds; where kids throw pencils at the ceiling, cheering whenever one punctures the styrofoam, or where kids, tucked in black beanies, oversized sweatshirts, and ripped jeans, swap bags of meth behind the history buildings.…
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