Efforts to locate next of kin had failed. Only the gravediggers and I stood in the ancient cemetery among the mounds of exhumed plots encircled by high-rise apartment buildings blocking the morning sun.
Otis murmured something about a skeleton crew. The others laughed and leaned on their shovels. I checked my watch—already a quarter after. The media would not be coming. I nodded to Otis. He climbed aboard the gravedigger, started its engine, and steered it over to the sunken rectangle. The claw descended and scooped up its first load of dirt.
Ten years ago, the Cremation Initiative had provoked fierce controversy. Exhumations were slow in the beginning until media attention declined, and the citizenry moved on to other concerns. A few grieving families made feeble protests, but disinterments proceeded at an ever-swifter pace, creating a boom for the cremation business, columbaria, and real estate companies, which scooped up the properties for development.… ...continue reading
Act 1. You and me
Filets of trout perfectly browned in warm butter beside a quartered lemon slice on two Wedgewood plates. A carrot-sculpted rosette. Two glasses of rosé. Brown, yellow, blue, orange, red passion. “I’ll have iced tea; she’ll have water.” The server left us alone to hold hands in the flickering light of a candle, the shape of light caressing your face like breezes rustling a redbird’s feathers.
Act 2. Her
I just want someone. Why can’t I find someone? They come in here every week, sit at the same table, hold hands, never see me, see only each other, like I’m a distant noise, a car crash in some other neighborhood, a solar flare whose eruption won’t affect their climate-controlled environment, a damned iceberg calving, dissolving into the sea, disappearing into atoms small enough to be carried on the waves of their love sighs.… ...continue reading
Most of the things my son did, spraying a can of deodorant down his throat, eating little orange berries off a tree in the park, berries his friends said were poison, wouldn’t work, but the noose he’d made by attaching his red and gold Gryffindor muffler to the light fixture on his bedroom ceiling could have done the job if the fixture had held his weight.
When, hearing the thump, I ran into his room, he said he didn’t know what happened. “But I’m not hurt,” he said. “Thankfully.”
Our daughter Carrie, his little sister, was at a friend’s birthday party. “Don’t tell her.”
She doesn’t need to know, I said, picking the pieces of broken glass from his bedroom floor. He wanted to clean it himself, but I wouldn’t let him, afraid he’d get hurt.… ...continue reading
I look at this imaginary painting on the wall –
A man is standing on an Irish cliff with the morning dew glistening
Upon the grass as green as green can be
And in his unruly beard that is sometimes more brown than red,
Other times more red than brown.
The sun is in his eyes and he’s squinting.
In the distance where he is looking
There is a roiling sea with a small ship rocking on it.
Two women are on that ship, on their way to stand also on the Irish cliff
Where the dew will cling to their bare feet and hang from the hems of their long flimsy skirts.
One woman is with the man of the unruly beard where the red and the brown do battle.… ...continue reading
I’ll have to come back to this book later when I’ve lost someone.
The book in that sentence is Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. The I in that sentence preparing for unknown yet certain losses is, of course, me. I was just sixteen, reading and journaling on a beach towel in my backyard, laying belly down with my bikini top off, hoping the tanning oil was making me good and bronze. I was sixteen, tanning in the backyard, and simultaneously stocking my mental fallout shelter like a prepper might stock up on canned tomatoes.
There are plenty of essays in which young women rhapsodize Didion. I love to read This is not one of them. I am concerned not with Didion herself, but with something Didion-adjacent.… ...continue reading
Mason Hamilton Williams was four and a half years old and it was a big long name and he could spell it all himself, Officer Jane Park had just learned.
“I kin even read. I told myself how to read when I was three and a half years old. Grownups didn’t tell me. I told myself. My teacher didn’t tell me. She told me the ABC’s but I already knewn that since I was two and a corter years old. The problem with grownups is. That they don’t listen. To the words.”
Officer Jane Park’s gaze drifted to the child’s light-up Paw Patrol sneakers thumping rhythmically against the metal legs of the chair. Under the bouncing feet a large coffee stain reposed on the dismal carpet.… ...continue reading
Red is the glow of a bonfire burning low between stolen glances.
Red is a plastic cup filled with sour liquid that stings like a sunburn.
Red is the burn of cranberry vodka as it stains clean white porcelain.
Red is the hem of my sundress, pushed up around my waist.
“Red looks good on you,” he grunts into my hair, sticky with liquor and vomit. “Brunettes always look hot in red.”
Red is blood circling the drain, coiled like smoke from a fired gun.
I stare at the red nail polish still sitting on my bathroom counter. It’s the only red thing I own that I haven’t purged yet.
Red looks good on you.
“Your eyes look red,” my mother says over a plate of burned toast.… ...continue reading