I had an eight percent chance of blue eyes. Maybe? Something around that number, if I am to believe the Punnett squares I scrawled on dinner napkins or the Polaroid photograph of my grandfather my mother keeps in a shoe box in her closet. There are veins of oxidation splitting the skin of his neck, wobbly lines [...]
Eight thirty is the scheduled time for my school bus to arrive. There is an affable man operating it, and a not-quite-as-affable-but-still-cordial young lady helping the smaller kids on and into child seats. Everything is completed as if in record time, children buckled in and doors closing with a neat little swish shwoo, the cooing of [...]
Why I feel old: the songs I used to listen to are on the Oldie’s station, the Pluto I knew erased from science books, the television shows I’d tape on the VCR discontinued, the slang I so liberally tossed around replaced by Internet memes, the actors I mimicked in rehab. I talk about Reagan’s funeral [...]
I don’t know when it suddenly became passé to mention the September 11 attacks. I’m given this look that’s almost disdainful, like I’m breaking some goddamn rule by talking about it. Is there a time limit to grief? I wonder if it’s because no one I know died there. I don’t have a right to [...]
He and I are so different I’m amazed we share genes at all. Besides the viciously sarcastic tendencies and vitriol obsession we both use incredibly well in fights, there is not much to link us together. I imagine him in a handlebar moustache and monocle: a sarcastic little Victorian boy shaking his head at a [...]
At six o’clock Alex produces three textbooks and a roll of plastic wrap from his backpack. So far, along with a stained shirt and an equally stained friend, this is what he has managed to bring back from his first day of third grade. Following a great tradition of schoolchildhood, he offers no other answer [...]
After the wedding I go outside in socks and sweater. The marquee is being slowly disassembled by a handful of caterers from Super Event – grim-faced workers in red shirts who afterwards sit on the cold grass and smoke cigarettes. I think about how my father had discovered this very habit in my cousin last [...]