I don’t do this. The last time I was truly, unabashedly a fan was when I was 8. I was watching reruns of The Partridge Familyand in love with David Cassidy. While other kids went to the store to buy Tiger Beats with pictures of Donny Osmond or Michael from Good Times, I begged my mom take me to garage sales to look for old magazines with David Cassidy on the…
I wanted to be a witch. I wanted to make potions and live in a world of Faerie or possibly in a dense forest of gigantic trees. I would sleep in a bed of moss.
Yet in my witches club, I anointed myself president and had so many rules, I ended up playing by myself or coming together with my friends not to make potions and enchant the sky, but to make my little sister drink mud. To make it…
We were having a Zoom cocktail party—our second one. We spoke one person at a time. Anything happen this week? How’s your sourdough starter? Is everyone okay? We took turns reporting.
I had looked forward to the Zoom room cocktail party. No one could trap me in a side conversation about some personal problem or work issue while there were other, funnerconversations going on. Instead, all…
The boy asked my father if he could take me out that night.
The boy had shiny dark hair. Naturally tan skin. His teeth gleamed. He would have been the most popular boy in my hometown of Maplewood, New Jersey. Here, he was just another Italian.
We were at a café in Rome with tables so small my parents, sister and I clustered around the table, our pasta plates clinking. The boy and my father…
My sister hates this picture of me. She sees bone and teeth. She remembers me as unhappy.
I see perfection. I was 17—happiness was irrelevant! It was 1985 and breastless and bootyless were the ideal. My mother, a waif herself, drank Tab, smoked Benson & Hedges, and always had laxatives and diet pills in her pocketbook.
Teenaged boy is sitting in his room listening to music blaring from the living room. Every so often he paces and texts in a ranting motion.
Are you listening to this? I mean, do you want to a) slit your wrists, b) poke your eardrum with a knitting needle, c) slit someone’s else’s wrists, or d) kill the person playing that FUCKING song AGAIN. …
I was in northern Hungary, and I needed a break from my traveling partner. After weeks together, we strained under the expectations we laid on one another.
I saw the town name Egerszólát next to an arrow pointing west on my map of Eger. In my Lonely Planet, I scoured the chapter and the author noted only that it was a quaint wine town. That was the only reference. No dot marked the location of…
I asked before I took this photograph. I asked in English, not Chichewa. They nodded. But in any language, that nod was reluctant. Let the Mzungu take the photograph. I smiled and said zikomo. Thank you.
They waited. I wondered how much the platter weighed. At the volunteer house, I had tried to balance a bucket of water on my head the way I’d seen women do. I got wet.
