Somehow I’d connected wearing a bra with a story on television about a young girl with polio in an iron lung. Her hair, head and neck were all that could be seen of the body inside the machine that breathed for her in place of her paralyzed diaphragm. She talked softly, and looked up into a mirror placed above her face,
Samantha set her alarm clock for 5 a.m. every day of the week—including weekends. She had the volume set on two and kept it on her side of the bed not to wake her husband Gene. The soft sound of her alarm lifted her up with out a moment of lag time. She reached over to turn off the alarm carefully, not
Verity. She appeared before us in the City Weekly newspaper, wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a bathtub, a child and yet a mummy—swaddled in soggy printers ink one wet September day like the day when the world came to know the name of heroin. The coffee was brewing. Brigham and I agreed wordlessly,
A glorious, buttery-warm light lit the summer of 1966. This was the summer that surpassed all remembered summers. They started to call themselves The Quartet as school let out. Mary, Colleen, Helen, and Anne were secretly teasing their brothers, Read More »
“Kid you got a golden thumb,” declared Cortis Haire. He had picked up the bright-eyed hippie outside of Los Angeles heading north on his pedal to the metal push towards Seattle. Read More »
I always thought I’d drown like Martha did. Thrown overboard with anchors attached, Fighting to breath, discovered six days later, reduced to a skeleton, tangled in a lobster trap.
1.
Our mother calls me to come and look at her. That is how we begin.
“Say something,” she says. She tries to sound petulant, but her image in the full-length mirror makes her smile.
“A sheath,” I offer, cross-legged on the floor. I hold a pillow on my lap despite the heat.
