“I have a theory,” she said on their first date, which was at an Indian restaurant where the music was a lovely singsong but the chef seemed enraged as he clapped a ball of dough between his hands, then threw it into the flames. And her date, whom she would never see again, who would…

I watched her transform by the sink over years and years. Black hair turning silver. Skin wrinkling. Fingers bending from arthritis. “These dishes take forever,” she would say. Night after night, with an almost religious devotion, she stood at the sink in front of the window and cleaned the dishes, scrubbing and drying until they…

On her thirteenth birthday, Susannah pledged herself to the moon. She grew up taller than a sunflower, spoke fluent cacti, trained snakes, and won every spitting contest on the continent. The collection of grandmothers she lived with warned her to never forget that men are only men and to always hold her breath while passing…

When I asked my friend about her summer, she told me about the fish that had died in her apartment. “I put it on top of the bookshelf,” she said. “It was Olley’s fish. She gave it to me. She said he was dying, and then she disappeared. I didn’t have food or anything. I…

Empire, the famous giraffe on loan from San Diego to our county zoo, had a freak accident and injured his neck and died. He was immediately buried in the zoo’s cemetery despite San Diego’s insistence that his body be returned. I had never taken my son Terrence to the zoo, let alone its cemetery. I…

After my cousin died, dropped dead at forty folding clothes, I got checked for what she had. They did an ultrasound on my heart, and I lay there listening to the beating as if inside my own uterus. Other than the sound of me, it was quiet, so I said, “Hey,” to the man on…

Is your workspace clean? Take a moment to tidy. An organized space cleanses your soul! Open your scrapbook and smell the pages. What does it smell like? Paper can smell like memory, like smoke, like the sun, like morning through the fog. Or even artichoke. I get my scrapbooks at an art school supply store…

I. Two Cards He had a poker face only a mother could love — rectangular, perfectly flat, framed by red hair, with a button nose, and with eyes so blue that they had to be covered by contacts — a face as ungainly as a mixed metaphor, a face best described in the one-step-away-from-reality words…

Marcie arrives at Danworthy Independent Living’s potluck with no expectations of delight. She made Swedish meatballs yet again, not because she likes Swedish meatballs or thinks that she makes them particularly well, but because it’s the only crockpot recipe she’s ever known, and at eighty-seven, she doesn’t see fit to learn anything new. Larry Hershberger…

“In the course of conducting interviews on the urban history of Jeddah, a port city in the Hijaz region of present-day Saudi Arabia, I came across the story of al-Qays …” — “Playing with Gender: The Carnival of al-Qays in Jeddah” by Ulrike Freitag + The tradition may have started this way, or it may…

Alex flew out here to stay with me a week. He recently got his own place, which does nothing to make me less obsolete in his life. Still, we had a plan and stuck to it, even though it was not a first choice for either of us. He’d grown his hair out since Christmastime.…

1. The dishes had belonged to his grandparents and were given to him as a gift. Plates, saucers, tea cups and bowls, all painted by hand and trimmed in metal, which made them valuable and beautiful, but also completely worthless pieces of shit, because they could not be placed in the microwave or washed in…