In July 2021, five weeks after my mother died, my husband dropped me off at the emergency room of the small hospital in the Massachusetts town where my father now lived alone.
A genius of the South. An embarrassment to the race. Singular American author; craven literary con artist. She was a loving champion of Black vernacular; she was a mundane writer of facile prose. A misunderstood cultural icon; a perfect...
When I was young, my dad would take me to the hospital, usually on weekends, mostly on Saturdays. He was visiting his patients, the ones he’d operated on earlier that week, when he’d replaced their hip or their knee. I remember these...
One day, while cutting the grass outside Lustrik Corp., Joey came across a garter snake. At Birds Birds Birds they were $11.99 each, but here was one for free, unscathed by lawn-mower blades, slithering right over the boy’s foot. It was the...
At Alice and Henry’s farm, it is time to mate the sows. Henry even bought a home pregnancy test for them—it is inserted into the vagina and simply beeps, with maddeningly little explanation, if it judges them to have conceived.
There are endless ways to lose your sense of place. A common one goes something like this: You call an Uber to get across town. You track the driver’s arrival on your phone and, once in the car, answer texts and watch a video on YouTube...