On the first day, it came for my abdomen, that sharp pain like the point of a knife, teasing the edges of my pelvis. The type of pain that makes you weep, less from the hurt, and more from the attack deep in the pit, in the core of your body.
And the doctor smiled.
“All part of being a woman, I’m afraid.”
“Or someone with a uterus,” I corrected.
He nodded in that sympathetic way you nod when your grandmother tells you she just saw her childhood friend, the one who’s been dead for decades.
“Of course. In any case, there’s not much we can do except keep an eye on it. Take some ibuprofen and see if that helps.”
I cradled my stomach, pressing my hand to my lower belly as I listened to words about how complicated my body was for having a womb, a piece of faulty machinery that no one could ever seem to troubleshoot correctly, an unfortunate bit of wiring that I would have done better had I been born without it.…
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They don’t tell you about what lingers after – not the pollution or those fiery regurgitations but the wispy krakens, the spiders and their webs. Cracks in the window of the sky. Desire lines circumvent the cumuli, trails forging intersections before they ever burst, and the sky goes lighter each time these paths retread. You know that there is no such thing as independence.
You remember the first time you saw the show. After years of just hearing them through the walls of your bedroom and seeing them on the local news, trying to match them up, your parents finally took you, and it seemed that day that you had grown to their equal. Not just awake when the night sky finally overtook the summer, but outside and celebrating, and the symphony played that sophisticated sound, each song heralding the coming display, red-white-and-blue carpet unfurling.…
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Wednesday, when the gardeners come, Big Mama pops in her ear plugs. (She swears by Mack’s Snoozers, made of silicone putty, uses them for sleeping normally.) Lawn mowers are notoriously noisy and these green-thumb guys also bring in a gas leaf blower. Even operated at half-throttle like our city law requires, they blast a big sound. But when I asked why she wore them, Big Mama said she turned to ear plugs because grass screams when you cut it and she couldn’t stand the noise.
Mom is a short five foot three, strong but skinny body, with race as mixed as a cake recipe—dark chocolate coming out on top. But she’s terrified of getting fat. She frowns at me every time I call her Big Mama, but we exist to tease each other.…
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Kathy’s had this key on her ring for twenty years now. It hasn’t unlocked anything in a very long time. Very occasionally, she will cull the set, when it gets too heavy, too jangly, or makes an ugly bulge in her clutch bag or her pocket. Picking through, she’ll remove the key from her bike lock, the one that didn’t keep her bike from being stolen. Another time she’ll sacrifice to the trash her parent’s house key, since they fled Buffalo, New York, for the horrors of south Florida. Other openers take their places. One for the padlock on her storage space in the basement of building. Another for the mailbox in the lobby. The lock for the new bike. Her rotating cast of facilitators.
This particular key once unlocked a door to a young woman’s dorm room. …
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She spies a young blond man with small ferret-like hands raking as she approaches the last trailer in the lot. The great fire is closing in, its smoke rising high just beyond the hill, and she is almost done with her shift.
“What are you doing?” she inquires, clipboard pressed to her orange vest as if for protection.
“I want my own fire,” says the young man with tiny eyes set close, just as a toothless woman in galoshes, a shift and red bandana emerges from the trailer. “Bader, gimme that thing. You ain’t doin’ what I think you’re doin’. Take your play matches. Go on while I get ready. I ain’t gonna holler after you, boy.” Bader drops the rake, grabs the large box from his mother like a prize.…
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Feelings don’t last. That’s what a therapist once told me. They disappear he said. I agreed with him until yesterday when old feelings resurfaced for the first time in ten years. I was in the Cat and Cage drinking with Mark Dunne. We were catching up on old school days. Alison, his wife, came in about two hours after we arrived and she was excited. She had photographs of a friend’s hen night and was passing them to Mark and me.
I didn’t take much notice of the photographs until I took a second glance at one of them. There stood the girl who was to get married, whose name escapes me and Greta O‘Rourke. I finished my pint and asked Mark and Alison what they wanted to drink.…
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On Monday, July 12th, 1999, at 3:15 pm, Sheriff Elmer Howe thought it curious that a forest green Ford Explorer sat alone in the shade of an oak tree in the student parking lot of East Pocono High School. Students left the lot completely empty in high summer.
The Explorer looked just like the one belonging to psychologist Arthur W. Rohrer, Ph.D., P.C. Arthur was married to Kimberly, which made him Elmer’s son-in-law. Arthur had left Philadelphia years ago to counsel troubled marriages in Scranton, but his office was a good twenty minutes up the highway. How strange.
Elmer pulled his squad car into the lot and parked behind the gymnasium. He looked for summer athletes training in the fields, but there were none. He used his shoulder radio to call the Explorer’s license plate in to Marie at the station.…
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