When I lived in Lubbock, Texas in my twenties, I used to wake to knocks on my bedroom door in the middle of the night. The knocks angry, insistent, three, sometimes four. Knock knock knock knock. I’d jerk awake, stare at the thin door made visible by the streetlight outside my window, my breath quick.
Read MoreIf someone said they were going to kill themselves, we kept them on the phone until they promised not to or until the police came or until they actually did kill themselves, which they never did. I made $13 an hour. We sat in a small white room. It was hard to keep track of the days and then it was hard to keep track of the months.
Read MoreIn August 2016, I left Seattle. My home of ten years, the Pacific ocean, the place where I made countless friends and met my wife and taught myself how to write and became a father and established the beginnings of an artistic career and truly, finally, maybe figured out who the fuck I am.
Read MoreThe Virgin Mary is peeking out from behind the edge of the bookshelf, praying for rescue, Anne of Green Gables looming large at her back. I’m six or seven, small enough to kneel beside the ceramic nativity on the shelf of cupboards that spans the length of the room and props up shelves of books. It is Christmastime, and Mary has become the heroine of my small hands.
Read MoreI came out in the only way I knew how, which is an Irish Catholic way of saying that I lied: I told her I was ‘newly’ attracted to a boy in my high school freshman class, but I insisted I was still straight. Insisted. I treated this same-sex attraction like a fresh, anomalous thing, even though this desire was the norm for me, constant and moving in all directions.
Read MoreWe were fifteen. We’d snuck into a place we weren’t allowed to be. We’d gone inside my house, I don’t remember why, and the lights were out, my parents not at home. The only light came slanted through the windows. Chris played the piano in the living room while Paul roamed the upstairs hall. What song did he play?
Read MoreIt’s my job to call on Christmas. Mine to call on Thanksgiving. Valentine’s day is optional, but I still call because I know it’s her favorite. On my birthday, it is her responsibility to call. On her birthday, it’s mine. That’s how it has always worked. I suppose it would be easier if we lived closer, but we don’t.
Read MoreIn his wheelchair, laborious and alone, he fought his way out there - wheelchair, ugly feeble word, embarrassing. So we called it The Chair like capital punishment, that twist always of bitter morbidity as he decayed and decayed inside, as he palsied and loosened like someone cursed to unravel back towards infanthood.
Read MoreWhen the first ship appears, it is a skyscraper eased down, steel oranged by rust and sunset. A low burn on the horizon. Not yet time for stars. The water between the two Great Lakes still, marinating. You must know this before I go on.
Read MoreAfter my grandfather’s memorial service in Arizona, in the high-ceilinged, dark-stoned, weighty kitchen of a vacation rental, my nurse practitioner cousin cuts a cyst three times the size of a bb from the top right portion of my head. She injects lidocaine through a twenty-five-gauge needle attached to a syringe into my scalp to dull the pain of the excision. A part of me wishes she wouldn’t.
Read MoreNeoclassic bones crumble. The 18th Century is propped by scaffolding along South Harbour yet visible under sheets of plastic. I’m struck by the stench of feces outside Hotel Kämp. Cracking pipes? I squint my vulture eyes: tourists swarm the Esplanadi for another free concert.
Read MoreMy mother’s first pregnancy was a turbulent one. Her body waged war on the clump of cells that was determined to be me. Though I eventually emerged unscathed, the umbilical cord was wrapped so tightly around my neck that I was nearly snuffed out before the doctors could even pronounce me female.
Read MoreWhen I was young I couldn’t tolerate mistakes. I would get upset over errors, over any wrong answer. I didn’t know the difference between good and right. My teacher in Japan was concerned enough to ask my parents how strict they were at home. Do you allow mistakes, he asked. Of course, they answered.
Read MoreFirst, forget the put-on bravery, the way you spoke of it freely, telling anyone who cared to listen and then, once you tired them out, telling those didn't care. How afterwards you bought a shirt with I HAD AN ABORTION in black block letters across the chest and wore it just to see who you could turn uneasy.
Read MoreI've spent a lot of time ten stories up. Nine hours a day, five days a week, for the past two and a half years. I work up here. I sit by the window. My company is a small marketing agency that sells hammocks and beard oil and, sometimes, US presidential candidates. There are snacks in the cupboards. Free beer on tap. One of the first things we noticed when we moved in was that the windows opened.
Read MoreFirst, forget your mother. Forget the childhood breakfasts of soft-boiled eggs pooled like yellow mucus in the bottom of a cracked coffee cup. Forget that you had to eat it all, even the undercooked white that dangled from your spoon like a rope of snot.
Read More“But then, it wouldn’t be you,” he finishes, his voice softer. His eyes are no longer on me, but looking out ahead of him, as if he’s seeing her, the me that isn’t me. And I wonder what I, she, looks like.
Read MoreThere are voices outside the window, real ones this time, and close by. I shrink in the dark room, contract until there’s nothing left of me but the sheen of an eye peering through the smoke-yellowed blinds. Brownish street light steals through the slats, striping the floor around me like bars.
Read MoreImparting white hairs, on Grandmother’s cheek, twenty years ago. And what’s more, a tiny coalition of light hairs—faint hairs—fragile hairs—mere shadows of hairs— gracing my lips and temples now. I suggest to you: me before a mirror, fingering their most fine and present texture. I say: I know, I insist, I attest. I have inherited. The hairs are my own.
Read MoreMy father is standing over the toilet in a rage. He’s in the bathroom at the top of the stairs, holding a wet plunger, watching the bowl swirl empty then slowly refill. Between flushes and plunges, water drips onto the discolored aubergine cut-pile nylon that carpets every inch of our suburban house, including all four bathrooms.
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