The last time Christine-Ann Corbin wore a dress was two months ago when she turned twelve. Her parents had a small birthday party and celebrated with a few friends and neighbors. The conversation quickly turned to the unrest in Europe.
Little Falls, Vermont, was exactly as its name revealed in the early summer of 1914, a small town of a few thousand inhabitants dependent on the many waterfalls to drive old flour mills and Hadley’s Metal Fabrications, the biggest employer, where her father worked. Hadley’s built fenders for the automobile market, and earlier in the year won a contract to fabricate them for the Army.
On this particular day, Christine prepared herself for another “conversation” with her mother about her refusal to wear a dress, something her teachers were increasingly unsettled over.…
...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
And anybody just might have killed five people.
And anybody just might have drowned a cat.
Barely audible at first, a woman on the train few had noticed began queerly and abruptly a conversation with all the hundred-odd passengers, one-on-one, as the train approached Chicago’s Union Station. Had I heard her right? She certainly had my attention: twilight made a mirror of my window, and I stared out blankly past a corner of my face back across the aisle and watched her where she sat alone. I’d seen her back in New York at Grand Central Station, a silver-haired woman in her late fifties, prim and proper. Her clothes, though from another era, seemed new, as if her beige woolen coat and pillbox hat had been pulled from storage only the day before. …
...continue reading
“Mom, I’m scared,” Kai messages me. “They shaved Eloise’s hair off this afternoon. I think they’re going to put something into her brain. I want to come home.”
Regular communication between Academy students and their families is strongly discouraged, and Kai has not messaged me since enrolling in September. His note crushes the air out of my chest.
Of course, I panic. I floor it from Forest Cove to Sugar Glen, past the Monsanto Crispr AminoSoy fields, Night Market distribution centers, holovideo poker parlors, and Poppy Cig lounges. The Academy has no need for an iron gate because they have electric fencing, twenty-four-hour surveillance, and robot security guards. At Parents’ Weekend last month, I was reassured the Academy was protecting Kai from predators and conspiracy theorists.…
...continue reading
I remember the night I met God. She was living in a rent-stabilized apartment on 76th Street just east of Amsterdam. I was delivering a DVD for the last store in Manhattan that still rented the damn things. It wasn’t much of a job, with crappy pay to be honest, and no benefits, but I was back in school and you did get to meet all sorts of interesting people in the city. You don’t know what melting pot really means until you deliver a box set of Tarantino to some downtown dive at three in the morning. I suppose I could have delivered pizzas just as easily, and at a more normal time of day, but then I never would have gotten to meet God.…
...continue reading
It’s a bitter moment when you realize the best and sweetest parts of you are gone. My hollow eyes in the rearview mirror are a firm reminder of that. Have I ever been happy? Maybe when I was a kid. So, I put my sad eyes back where they belong, on the empty road ahead.
In the midst of feeling sorry for myself, I think I missed the turn. Whatever.
The navigator says the highway entrance is zero-point-five miles away. But the on-ramp is a thick red string attached to a blinking light that reads: accident.
“Guess I’m gonna be late for the party,” I mumble to myself.
The navigator blinks: Alternate route found, and I press to proceed. Cortège Rd next Right.
Incoming call.…
...continue reading
I can’t keep saying what everyone wants to hear, that I have bad days but basically everything’s okay. Things are not okay. I pretend I care only to avoid the fallout of admitting what I actually think and feel. If I said how I truly feel I’d be an outcast or end up having to endlessly justify why I’m so insensitive. My wariness of being found out runs so deep I can’t imagine life without it. All the precautions, the second-guessing, just so I can open my mouth and say, How are you doing today? and give the appearance of someone who gives a shit. I probably did at one time, way back. Where that part of me went I don’t know. Needing to keep up appearances has flattened any honest sentiment. …
...continue reading