Right after Mel died, the power did too. The lights, the TV, everything. A tropical storm was trudging ashore and pounding Miami, the ash colored sky spinning down over roofs and hemorrhaging raindrops the size of quarters. My father took precautions. He clad himself in a dull-yellow rain jacket and hat. Knee-high boots, too. He…

Beat Sheet Mother is late again. She pulls up and Zach throws himself on the floor. She’s promised a treat if he behaves at the beach. He has Bobby’s soft Augusta drawl. “Ass cream, Gramma, ass cream.” We stop to give Jenna a lift to the airport. She knows how mother feels about her work.…

The bones made us so happy. We had been searching for anything to play with for weeks. You couldn’t do much with a wet twig or a handful of bark. We tried bowling with balls of dried mud but that fell apart quickly. “I guess that’s the way the mud ball crumbles,” our mother said.…

Here’s a picture of Janice Baker sitting on a wooden bench at the park holding her exposed left breast. This might be my favorite picture. I’ve looked at it so many times. Janice won’t care that I’m showing you this, at least not in this realm because she’s dead. Her parents won’t care either because…

My father saved me from drowning in the Atlantic Ocean. I remember, even if he can’t anymore. My tiny self toddled around on the hot sand. I scooped up fistfuls, threw it into the air, and watched the wind whisk it away. Waves crashed, the peaks of white foam beckoned and I entered the water…

The water leaks between the base of the toilet and the tile floor. It’s been leaking since he and his wife bought the house three years ago. She’s told him to fix it many times. Each day, after she leaves for work and he drops their son off at school, he goes to the upstairs…

In Eugene, Oregon I used to live with two women — Charlene and Ms. T. We were young, we weren’t fluent in anything and had never been anywhere but we talked about Europe like we grew up on baguettes and Da Vinci. We read each other Krishnamaruti’s philosophy of unattachment and stole neighborhood cherries, plums…

Once upon a time in the wheezing heart of America… The leaves are dying all their little deaths. On the way home, Elle’s cigarette whispers smoke into her clothes. Jo joins her, kicking up dust in her ass-kicking boots. They pass a women’s clinic and its handful of protestors. “I hate our fucking school,” Jo…

People in the street and on the subway began looking at her oddly. Double takes with furrowed brows and cinched mouths, as if trying to place where they’d seen her before. The other day in the Laundromat, she even thought she heard a woman whisper to her little girl, “Hey, it’s Betty Zongo.” She wondered…

Before the nurse closed the door, she poked her head in my room and said, “Sugar, you gonna lose your milk if that baby don’t suck.” My eyes opened, crusted with sleep. “Or you can pump,” she said. She patted the metal doorknob, her ring clinking against it. “‘Night, Rhonda.” My name is Brenda. She…

Clusters of Home Depot deck furniture, ambience of chlorine, of eighties music murmured from rock-shaped speakers, iced upscale beer and cheapish wine, a no lifeguard on duty sign, a no peeing in pool sign, the pool kidney-shaped and sensible, the too-blue water refracting a vinyl pool liner, platter of splayed white and yellow cheeses in…

THEN Savosoyah was a proud man. For his wife, for his son, for his daughter: he protected and provided. Few men could climb rock as he could; few men could shape and wield a spear with equal skill. But when his young daughter took pained and feverish, Savosoyah was overcome with helplessness. He tried and…