I planted pills in the garden and watched them sprout. It was growing season. Birds came and ate the leaves and flew off sideways, sedated. My tongue went dry. The truth was, I missed my arrogance: believing that the saints smiled when no one was looking: believing I could be the sun that never slept. But here we are. The pills grew plants with sweet flowers. Birds plucked them off one by one: the birds sang backwards: the birds put their heads in fountains to cool off. I didn’t miss the pills. I was a little sick. Maybe I didn’t want to be seventeen again. Maybe I just wanted to fit into my graduation dress. It’s not an addiction if you’ve got a prescription. The birds laid eggs that didn’t hatch.…
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It was a bookmark during the last week. He hadn’t noticed. Rarely did. She would wait for his Friday night shift. Sleeping neighbors wouldn’t see the taxi. She wondered how it would feel touching down, and if she needed a new book for the journey; something with fresh, unread chapters.
Dog-eared pages scarred novels across his shelf. No care. Fitting. She lived for the quiet hours; long-awaited calm. Silence apart from the soft purring of a cat that wasn’t hers. She craved something of her own; unblemished, familiar. New without being foreign, easy to understand.
Parts of her would remain; fabric dangling from coat hangers, bottled aromas in cupboards, worn letters from happier days tucked into corners of drawers, out of sight. She knew to cradle the essentials of her soul, take them with her. …
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Devon was a difficult patient. Eleven years old when his aunt brought him to me. “He hardly ever speaks,” she said. “But he used to, she told me, before the accident.”
There had been a house fire which killed his brother and his parents; only Devon survived. Devon ran to a neighbor for help. He said he smelled smoke and couldn’t wake his family. The fire department concluded that the fire started in Dylan’s room, possibly from matches.
The aunt was the mother’s sister. It had fallen on her to tell Devon the news and, for now, to raise him. “He says he wants to live in a box,” she said. “That’s why we’re here.”
Our early sessions were unproductive. I was new to the trade.…
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The New York winter chill disappeared when Jean entered the lobby of Maxine Elliott’s Theater, crowded with women. It was Jean’s fourth matinee since November 20th, when The Children’s Hour premiered.
She hadn’t returned for the play, but for the largely female audience, and more to the heart, for the maddening crush she had on one usherette who seated her in the second balcony.
In the last few years, Jean had scoured through journals on sexuality in the public library. Doctors called her condition inverted, depraved, a mistake of nature. Was it any wonder Martha killed herself at the end of The Children’s Hour?
Jean escaped into books, museums, theaters, and music recitals. For a few hours, the stranglehold of her homosexuality vanished into a novel by Pearl Buck, a painting by Matisse, a musical by Cole Porter, or a recital of Gershwin.…
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The trail was steep.
As Sarah climbed, she pushed from her mind the mangled doe carcass she’d passed on the drive up. Instead, she embraced the growing distance between herself, and the road, and life back home in the city. The woods became quiet. The only sound was her breath and heartbeat, and the crunch of dry leaves underfoot. A gentle wind moved through the tall blue-green pines with the occasional low, slow whoosh. With every step, her mind stilled, the relentless waves of intrusive thoughts calming, so that the flotsam of ideas simply flowed past her.
After this weekend alone in the mountains, she’d find a way to reduce her workload.
She’d read to Theo’s kindergarten class.
Make more time to connect with her husband.…
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“My lips are sealed,” I told Ellie as we sat cross-legged in her closet, the edges of her dresses draping over our heads. We usually laughed at how the fabric framed our faces like a nun’s habit. Nothing was funnier to us then. At almost thirteen, the world was spread out all around us, new and untried. Give that up to shut ourselves away and pray? Hilarious. But that day there was no laughter.
“This isn’t a baby secret like when I had a crush on Andrew West,” Ellie lectured, “This is real. Cross your heart, hope to die—”
“Stick a needle through my eye,” I finished dutifully.
Together we’d weathered the horrid pixie cut Ellie got in fourth grade and the time I tripped and fell on stage during the sixth grade assembly.…
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My lover tells me the story of Laüstic, The Nightingale. In Marie de France’s lai, a noble woman listens to a nightingale on her balcony each evening in the unspoken company of a handsome neighbor for whom she yearns as beautifully and perfectly as the bird sings. Her husband, ignorant of his rival, kills the nightingale and delivers her the bird wrapped in his handkerchief. Now you will have no reason to leave our chamber and stand on the balcony. The corpse is small and warm, the linen damp and stained with blood from the arrow’s wound. She holds it until even her burning hands cannot warm the bones.
My lover is the jealous husband. His wife, who is still in the city where he used live, meets nightly with his best friend.…
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