As the children of single mothers, neither Miri nor I usually had big plans on Christmas. As soon as we could drive and Miri got a car, we started a tradition of going to the movies and then for a night swim at her grandfather’s place, which she called a house but was really a…

Tofu hot dogs grill up pretty good, I overheard a well-dressed man say to another on the metro yesterday. I was on my way home from work with a few sacks of groceries, feeling sad, as I’d just spied upon a form at work outlining cost-of-living increases for this and next year, and there was…

That Tuesday, the mediator dropped in to the support group half an hour early. It was an accident. She still hadn’t set the clocks in her apartment back for Daylight Saving Time, and somewhere between reruns of Friends and half-boiled egg noodles, she overlooked the mistake and left immediately. If she’d been right about the…

There were a few after there was you. Jill, her kisses tasted like kiwis. Not the green ones, but the sweet yellow kind, which she was allergic to, so maybe that’s why she tasted like them. When we kissed, I got itchy and thought it must be sympathy pain. Then it wasn’t just my skin,…

I leaned against the windowsill of our upstairs den and watched cedar waxwings attacking the berry tree in our yard, tipping their heads back in glee and gluttony with each thieved berry. Their shrieking had awakened me on my cot in my makeshift bedroom just as light was crawling over the dew. Now I slapped…

63 degrees: It is spring. We are languishing on the hoods of our cars in the school parking lot, that’s otherwise empty because it’s a Saturday. A Chrysler from the 80s, a Ford truck from the 70s, a Lexus from 1998, a newer model Corolla, and a shiny new Tesla. If it were October and…

Abraham Haglin came out west to save the Indians and the mountain men. He was a tall man, stooped, with a weak chin, and a nose wedged between his small eyes as hooked as a furrier’s knife. Munro hadn’t minded him so much. Not like some of the others. Not like Jimmy Jock Bird, who…

The voices of the new mothers gathered in the lobby carry to the examination room, where Carla waits for the midwife. Accompanied by the cries of their infants, the mothers in the mom-and-baby group talk mostly about breastfeeding — the tingling, often painful, sensation of letdown; the nuances of their infants’ suckles; breast milk’s sweet,…

Eddie said to send the lobster first-class or whatever it took to get it to Wyoming alive and reasonably happy so they could boil it to death there. He made her smile, talking like that. She’d fallen in with him yesterday afternoon at the fundraiser, on probably the largest private lawn on Cape Cod. He…

Below the winding river road there are naked sunbathers clinging to naked milk-sucking babies, spotless rainbow of towels, neat corners, not a speck of sand because nudists are worried about getting grit out of all their sensitive cracks and crevices. There are women’s swollen breasts, their sun-oiled babies, the river’s vintage waves, its hollow curves.…

Jane wears her lucky bra, the one with white lace; I wear Roman Holiday Red lipstick, the color that makes boys look twice. We leave the hostel teetering on the cliff’s edge. The day is behind us: the ruins unearthed from ash, the looming double-humped volcano, the man on the train back to Naples rubbing…

The storm lasts three days, and by the end of it the mud is sliding under the patio door into the kitchen. Our baby, who has just learned to walk, slaps her feet through the mud on her way to the living room and you chase her, swatting at her diaper with a hand towel.…