Nadia knows, when the mother leaves them, that they will die. They lurch from side to side, low on the ground, ears folded over into crinkled triangles. Claws soft, mouths brown with dirt, meowing in the damp soil of the flower bed.
You schedule the U-Haul for a weekend when your husband plans to be in the woods. You do not repeat your argument that camping isn’t medication or therapy. That it cannot, in other words, fix him. You make him a sandwich for the drive to Mendocino. As his car pulls away, you know it’s the last time you’ll see him.
How long I’ve dreamt of you, teenaged and long-legged, lying on our porch, your mud-speckled sandals kicked off to the side, watching a tree slowly split
My dream daughter is chopping onions. She has been chopping for hours, slipping off the skin like tea-colored lingerie, slicing them thinly like the rings of some beloved planet.
I cannot remember the last meal I shared with my father. Only those long last nights slipping him what ice chips he could still stomach and then swabbing his chapped lips with a wetted pink sponge.
Rochelle and her mother lived in a large town that was on its way to becoming a small city. On her way to school, Rochelle often stopped to watch the crews of construction workers erect a new house in the hole where, only a few days before, one of her neighbors’ houses had loomed in sour glory, a car parked on its front lawn, silk flowers sprouting along its foundation like hair plugs.
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