Antitheticality
When I died I had a self reminder on the back of my hand. I forget what it said now, but it was something like, Don’t forget that thing you are supposed to remember. My sister, fresh from meditation, found me face down in a pile of intention, and tried to scrub it off my hand so as not to upset Mother, who always warned…
OR 122 Painted Hills
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Our sixth-grade classroom smelled of stale peanut butter and scrapped fruit wafting from the lunch pails inside our desks—those we’d crouched under in drills during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Word problems and diagrammed sentences sprawled across the blackboards flanking the front and side of the room, and sunlight spilled through the casement windows running along the outside wall—the sun in Philadelphia, the same one we…
Writers Without Tires
As steam escaped from the right side of the car, we quickly pulled onto the shoulder of a highway off-ramp. Realizing that the turbulence was not a bumpy road, but that something somewhat serious had occurred, we filed out of the car to assess the situation and were confronted by a shredded front tire. Our dark brown Camry, as we would later describe it to…