The first Christmas my wife teaches kindergarten, our daughter, Aurora, is one and a half years old. My wife is allowed a three-week winter break. Neither of us has held a job that gives so much time off.
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I was a contortionist. I kneeled on the carpeted mall floor, bent at the waist, my arm snaked inside the Big Grab claw machine all the way up to my shoulder, pushing past the metal flap.
A few years earlier, the most 1980s thing to ever occur took place mere feet from where I now kneeled.
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At Newgrange on the Winter Solstice, the light only stays in the cavern for seventeen minutes before fading into nothing. The darkness before the light comes is blacker than the insides of your eyelids. It is a prehistoric darkness. A before-time darkness.
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The first rule is to listen. This is a game of imagination, so players don’t simply move plastic tokens—no, they create unique characters with personalities and rich histories. The man explaining this to me on New Year’s Eve, for instance, is an academic Wizard.
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There’s a rabbit on my balcony. I call him Elvis. Not after the singer but after the Canadian figure skater with the mullet. The rabbit has a mullet too, though it’s gray instead of soot-black like the figure skater’s. My father found Elvis in the woods with a broken leg. The rabbit, not the figure skater.
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KL commented on read and please fix my writing:
I was seventeen, sixteen, fourteen, ten years old. That time when I was sitting in my room, watching TV, playing a video game, working on homework, and I heard your voice calling my name.
Read MoreIt’s a nosebleed heat in mid-February. When it’s warm like this I circle around the block, find shell casings by gutters. My dad’s dad sold guns on this street. Dragged his leg and a bottle behind him. He died on Valentine’s Day—kidney limp and heart beating.
Read MorePedro (his name isn’t really Pedro but to me he is Pedro, like so many of them are, like we all are, my Pedro now) is outside the apartment. Somewhere between the hours of 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. Friday going into Saturday. There is little importance as to weather conditions, season, environment. I have known him through it all: rain or shine, dorm rooms and bathrooms, winter and summer, single and not single.
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Here, in the central San Joaquin Valley of California, my father grows raisins. He cuts an imposing figure: six-feet tall with thin limbs and thick glasses that magnify the size and power of his eyes. He does everything—can do anything—quickly and well.
Read MoreAs you walk through the automatic doors, keep this in mind: supermarkets—and now all other things—are arranged wrong. Heavy items like sacks of rice, number-ten cans of tomatoes, and five-liter bottles of your brother’s death are all on aisle 7—after bananas, after white bread, after eggs. Leave a hollow in your cart for the heavy stuff.
Read More1. Missy and I sit on the floor, two young women with bruises over our arms. Men call her Baywatch after the TV show because she is pretty with blonde hair. She’s not voluptuous like Pam Anderson. She’s under one-hundred pounds with skin like glass but she doesn’t break not even when the cocaine makes her seize. A pain between her legs—a memory of motion…
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