In his last days he became a different person. Lots of people say this, and they mean their bitch of a mother started paying attention to them, or their husband, his brain honeycombed with tumors, forgot their name. But my father, a lifelong painter, music lover, and general bohemian, became obsessed with shipping lanes.
He […]

We had to wait for hours there, crammed in a cold room with uncomfortable chairs. The only magazines were Readers Digest. We tried to make small talk with each other but it petered out after a few minutes — we knew there was no point in jumping the gun.
Finally we were called in, one […]

In the beginning we had six. Two were black and three were orange and one was black and white striped with bug eyes. Goldy was one of the orange ones. At first I had her pegged as the weakling. I didn’t tell the kids, but I knew the goldfish would die. It […]

At first when the house began to burn we thought it was a dream. Both of us did, I found out later — even then, we still met every night in a landscape of our fears. I thought I saw a green-red demon laughing at us from the flames. But it was […]

I got my new computer on Monday, and let me tell you, I was pretty excited. I’d been using an old Fujitsu I got from my nephew, and the thing was starting to act up — “Fatal Exception Error,” “Invalid Page Fault,” that kind of nonsense. I needed a new machine if I was […]

I’m driving to Iowa! Stories again starting August 20.

When we first got there I realized we were years, decades too late. The house was glutted, packed to the edges, bursting open like a rancid sausage. Old cereal boxes flew out the windows when the wind blew. Packages of toenail clippings pressed up against the instruction manuals for electronic equipment hopelessly buried in […]

All the visitors ask the same question. After more than a year become on the not godforsaken place, when we survived just barely on raw fish and stringy albatross, why did we tried to drive away our rescuers? Why did we fly a plague flag over the ship, and, when they boarded anyway, why did […]

The vet told us we had to let her go through her first heat before he would spay her; otherwise, she wouldn’t be fully mature. We weren’t sure what fully mature meant for a house cat — at eight months, she still liked the tassels on the rug better than her food, and fell asleep […]

Greed? No, there were lots of reasons I made him do it, but money wasn’t one of them. I didn’t care if we were eating hobo rice, or nothing at all, as long as we were happy.
And yes, it did make us happy. He’d rush in there with his gun and his note, and I’d […]