It’s everywhere now: the community pool, the deputy sheriff’s mascara, the baby strollers on Main. But what I simply can’t bear are the other cars. My wife and I passed two more yesterday, on the freeway through Umatilla National Forest, each one a harpoon in my side. Sleek, muscled drop-tops, and—how had I not seen…

My father planted the hungry tree in the crack in the driveway, assuming it would starve, wither in the summer heat. He thought it would die before the first leaves unfurled. Today, I harvested six seeds from the branches I can reach. Its roots sprawl, breaking the driveway into uneven slabs. I navigate these like…

Dear beloved child of mine, You were the size of a kumquat when I first found out about your existence. Since discovering this fact, I’ve stopped eating the small, orange fruit that I can enfold in one palm. But they’re everywhere now. Hanging from small trees. Displayed in wooden bowls. Candied on crisp tarts. It’s…

One. Tell your boyfriend that you’re Bonnie and he’s Clyde. Show him the famous photograph, Bonnie leaning against the car, cigar drooping from her lip, gun in hand. Tap the photo and tell him that could be you someday. Don’t tell him how Bonnie and Clyde died: her typewriter and his saxophone in the car,…

New England’s ghosts return bound in swirls of humidity, pushed by hurricane winds. Sea captains who went to the briny deep instead of to their corseted lovers, colonial toddlers who plunged through open windows. The Pequots, Mohegans, and Narragansetts who fell to smallpox and genocide as their descendants fought and survived. Ghosts of indentured servants…

He was that type of boy: the kind who skinned live squirrels and bunnies and other small creatures in his backyard when he was a child. His parents (Bless their souls! said the neighbors) sent him to intensive therapy at a ranch for troubled kids in Utah and now he was perfectly normal and sane…

When I was ten my aunt dated a wealthy man for a while. The first time I met him they took me out to a dark restaurant with linen tablecloths and three forks to the left of every plate. My aunt was babysitting that night and told my parents that she’d take me to the…

The cicadas chorused as Laney pushed off on her bike, past the neighborhood pavement onto the old fire road. Glass vials rattled in her backpack while she kept wheels balanced in thick sand, following the empty trek from Miller’s pond. It was too hot to fish, so it had been just her and the mosquitoes.…

Three days after the funeral the only things left were her ukulele, her monkey, and me.  I understood why no one wanted me or the monkey, but I’d expected the ukulele to go quickly. Kristin’s friends and family had cleaned out her belongings with shopping bags and suitcases, broad-shouldered boyfriends and puffy spouses along for…

Water sloshes between my toes as we run through the rain to the overflowing street, where I clear the sewer drain with my naked foot, three-week-old Margot in her carrier under my slicker, slippery like skin. By the time we return to the house, the sump pump is beeping. Water runs along the basement floor…

Because I was twenty-four, an entitled American full of wants. I wanted, and not necessarily in this order: Because, because. Chris, mentor, knowledgeable expat. Sabrina. Moroccan. An artist. Beautiful, smart, ambitious. She was everything I felt I wasn’t. I loved that in her, that otherness.  But did I love her? And she, me? Answers came…

“I still think we can make this work,” I say, as we approach Walt and Mickey on their floral cement pedestal in the middle of the theme park. She won’t even look at me.  Bronze Walt reaches his arm out to bestow happiness upon us. I almost trip on the cobblestones along Main Street USA.…