The pilot and I stayed at a cheap, extended-stay lodge by the small-craft airport during the first six months we were together. I was really young. Twenty-two. About to turn twenty-three, but I was just twenty-two.
Back then, I spent my hours at church studying the trails of His varnished blood and the seepage of His emaciated gut. The crucifix hung high above the celebrant’s chair, and the ribs looked so sharp they could cut.
My boyfriend doesn’t really drink but he loves bars. He likes talking to strangers (he’s a sales executive) and he likes talking to strangers at bars; I hate talking to strangers but I like listening, and I like listening to him do it, how...
They started making their annual sojourn to Big Sur the same year they met at Chevron, not pumping gas, but getting buttoned up every morning to put their chemical-engineering degrees to good use at the refinery in Richmond, the one that...
When I left Anhui for Shanghai, at the innocent age of seventeen, the recruiter told me that the theme of the hotel where I was going to work was “rustic farm life.”
One December 24, Superstorm Mindy came in from the Atlantic and walloped America. Nowhere got it worse than New York City. That Christmas Eve day, Louise Wexler had planned to ride public transit all the way from her apartment in...
Holland spent Wednesday building a privacy fence for a tiresome academic couple in Barton Hills. Pressure-treated posts, horizontal cedar boards, stained and sealed, it was his third that week.
The hospital was uptown on First Avenue, big, pale, and brand new, its atrium lobby with windows two stories high. Ivy held her son’s hand crossing bright squares on a white floor.
Soon the first cars will arrive for Mass. I can picture them floating down the streets of our city, this suburb of Los Angeles populated by gladsome old people and families with small children and a murky middle swath to which my husband...
