Essays, nonfiction, and short fiction.
Update
I woke up this morning and realized it’s been over a year since the “big move” to the burbs in New Jersey and all the miniscule details that went into making it possible. One whole year? Am I remembering this correctly? If you asked me earlier in the week I would have hesitated, made a snide “father time sleeping on the job” kind of joke, and told you it felt like 3 months versus the one whole calendar year that has actually passed.
MISTER GEORGE
Marta bends down to scrutinize the rubbish at her feet. From a distance, the Box Tops for Education look like an exploded piñata stuffed into a shoe box. Up close, each one is evenly cut with a faded yellow and blue boarder. Mister George asked her not to throw them away. He’s been saving them for the Forest Hill Elementary fundraiser and every cent counts. Oona, his oldest daughter, hasn’t gone to the school in decades and her own children go to Dwight-Englewood Academy, an expensive private school north of their grandfather’s house. Marta empties the shoebox into an extra large Ziplock bag and sets it aside.
Letter to my Son
Son,
Your due date passed in silence. I packed your clothes into two trash bags, the beginning of what would’ve been your first year, and placed them on the halfway point on the stairs. Carefully curated onesies, sweatpants, and sweaters combined with clothes and toys your sister has outgrown. Two weeks later I drove them to Goodwill.
For Paul
I don't know where to begin.
The quiet hatred I carry for my fiancé is liquid cement permeating my stomach and intestines, hardening and softening, as he gently smiles and asks me how I'm feeling. My pregnancy was a source of passive aggressive fat jokes, culminating in him telling me I was chubby while he hasn't lost an ounce of the 60lbs he said he would two years ago.
Letters to my Daughter: September 2, 2020
I've entered my late 30's alienated from your father, his family, raising you on my own with infrequent visits from him. He uses you as a prop to impress his girlfriend. No more phone calls and quick messages from Gigi -- It's the two of us against the world.
I have a power within myself that carries me through everything untouched. It glows within me when dealing with your father. I imagine myself as fine mist being pushed through the air like white ribbons, bouncing off of everything I touch, making no purchase with the world around me. I'm flexible and unknowable, building momentum toward something larger than myself. I respect myself more than needing to hold onto anyone, being your mother has taught me that.
Letters to my Daughter: July 19, 2020
he sun rises over the Lafayette River and makes our sun room glow. I watch it overtake the tree line across the water sitting in my papasan chair. It's something I do regularly with coffee before I wake you. A crumbling sidewalk forms a T below us, ending before the sandbar I take you to build sandcastles and continues over the bridge above the river.
Our neighbor's sun room caught stray bullets early in the morning, several pops and shattered glass before the sunrise and Old Dominion rowing teams could be seen gliding across the water. Before that, a car rammed into the corner streetlight, the only thing standing in between our friend's unit, a high speed police chase that ended in two people dragged out of the muddy distributary that separates us from our traditional home-owning neighbors. I stood in my sun room watching police officers walk along the sidewalk, between our garages, some with flashlights while most aggressively talked into their two-way strapped to their shoulders in the dark. Nothing came of either of those events, you slept through them, I watched along with my elderly neighbors with detached interest. I chose this place for how both remote and connected it was at the same time, hidden within an historic upper middle class neighborhood, but not even the affluent are safe from downtown Norfolk.
Letters to my Daughter: November 24, 2019
Your father shuts himself in the smallest room of the house and sleeps on an air mattress with a throw blanket he bought from Amazon. He spends hours talking to a girl he met on an online game. She's the full package. He’s confessed his love for her in a low, timorous voice lying curled up on his air mattress, it squelches and bumps against the door whenever he moves. He's reassured her we're leaving soon and is trying to convince her to move in with him to see if it would work out. He wants to be respectful to me and show you what it looks like for a man to love a woman of quality. He told her he never loved me, I was just a girl he got pregnant before he left for deployment. He tried to do the right thing by us, but I'm too different and don't listen. He invited us to stay with him to help me get back onto my feet because he wasn't comfortable with the sub par living conditions of our old apartment.
I wasn't supposed to hear that, but I did and it can't be unheard.
Four years robbed of value -- laundry washed and meals cooked without needing to be asked, illnesses catered to, trips to the zoo, movies watched together that made you smile, teaching you how to swim in the pool, going to the library to find books for you, including him in our mundane life that no one else gets to see, giving him the opportunity to become an involved father, sharing the most intimate parts of myself with him, all discounted because he's unable to admit to himself he squandered his time with us lost in depression and alcoholism.
Letters to my Daughter: September 2, 2019
Being your mummy is nuanced: I pay bills, mete out my time prudently throughout the day, and ensure you have what you need. Days blend into each other. I avoid cheap coffee with an electric espresso machine under my desk. I should feel fortunate, but my heart is a black star folding into itself.
Your father bought a small house with an in-ground pool in the backyard and invited us to live with him for a while. The water is a deep emerald and your toys are kept in a broken bucket by the steps. You have a queen size bed in a room twice the size of your old room with a window facing the tepid green water in the backyard. What's left of our modest life before your father's house is stacked in boxes in the attic. I imagine taping them closed and shipping them back to Washington state. I don't understand why he wanted us here or even why I agreed.
Letters to my Daughter: July 2, 2018
I buy our clothes from thrift stores, eyes lowered with you balanced on my right hip. Every Thursday there's a 25 percent military discount. I push through clusters of clear plastic hangers, an endless quilt dulled under fluorescent lighting, you point at strangers behind us.
Letters to my Daughter: October 24, 2017
I measure the passing of time by your illnesses, small victories in my day, the presence of new teeth pushing through your tender gums, the way we both sleep through the night. All of it adds up to our life together. Mundane and beautiful.
I have plans for us. I imagine us with passports visiting Canada. You'll have a small backpack and carefully assembled outfits, I'll have a medium case on wheels for the bulk of our things. We'll be explorers, experiencing the world from two different points of our shared life. I'll be slowly encroaching middle-age as you grow into yourself, I'll hold your hand and anything will be possible.
Letters to my Daughter: September 13, 2017
You crawl around scattered toys on the floor, tottering on wobbly knees with outstretched hands as if you're gauging the distance between yourself and larger objects the way I watch the leaves on the tree flutter outside. Chewing on your bottom lip you advance, your small fingers dig into the carpet for traction. I watch you tumble, lying flat with your small toes spread out toward the ceiling, and we both wait. It’s been like this for a while. I chase after you and you smile and we do it all over again. Grownup life will be much the same, tumbling and waiting for something bigger to happen, your face pressed against something hard with little strength left to manage. I won’t always be there to help you work through it.
Letters to my Daughter: May 12, 2017
Your father left us twice and I was never the same. The first time was when I told him I was pregnant with you. The second time was after two weeks of living together and he told me he didn't love me. We were a burden to him — he lost sleep and his blood pressure was high. I vacillated between numbness and feeling sick with grief.
Letters to my Daughter: May 2, 2017
I'm sat cross-legged next to you and you're swimming. Small creases encircle your wrists and ankles and I'm mesmerized by them. You hold them in the air and groan, body tense with your head above the quilt I placed on the floor for us. I want to remember you like this always. A little person struggling to make headway across a seemingly insurmountable square of fabric. Your gusto. The way you rest by clutching Bunny under your chin and nibble on his ear.
Letters to my Daughter: February 4, 2017
No one taught me how to be a mother. Your small cries tore me in half and I'll never be the same again. You smelled like sweet cream against my chest the first time I held you. Numb from the waist down, doctors and nurses calmly cleared the pool of blood you left behind. An older friend cut the cord and I was exhausted. It took me over 30 hours, two epidurals and a kind of pain I can't describe. Other women have told me they've forgotten labor pains. I don't believe them — I remember everything.
Letters to my Daughter: September 19, 2016
I don’t feel time anymore and my self deprecation gets me through the day. No one wants to know about my bouts of insomnia or how surreal it is to feel the rhythm of your hiccups inside me because I’m alone. I’ve spent months collecting trinkets and clothes for you like a rotund magpie.
Letters to my Daughter: August 15, 2016
It’s warm outside, the kind of heat that envelops you, but it’s more comfortable than the artificial coolness inside the house. I feel you throughout the day and it’s hard to believe you’re a part of me. My breasts and stomach are swollen, I’ve bought loose fitting tops to accommodate you, I’ve donated several pairs of shoes to Goodwill and spend too much of my morning trying to make sense of what I’ve dreamt. Your fist pushes against my ribs and I press back with my fingertips below my sternum.
Letters to my Daughter: May 22, 2016
he ultrasound equipment thumped rhythmically next to me as I watched your small transparent legs pump beneath you on an outdated black and white screen. The nurse gave me cold moist wipes to clean the lubricant off my stomach and blurry screen captures ground out on cheap paper like a series of receipts from the grocery store. I wanted to replay that moment over and over.
Amanecer
Sentimentality and a predilection towards mysticism is common with the women of my family. In my teens my aunt took me to her bruha, a short dark haired woman who could tell my fortune by charting the arrangement of stars on the day I was born. It felt silly, but Tia was in earnest. It was her way of ensuring I was prepared for what lay ahead.
Yes All Women
My sense of self has been tempered by the men in my life, each carrying a personal hurt so deep my love couldn’t reach them. Whether it was failed dreams or lack of gumption it fell upon me like hot bile. Suddenly what they failed to see in themselves I suffered in tandem. I wasn’t allowed to exceed their limitations and my affection for them was supposed to be inexhaustible.
Limbo
Summer is brief and oppressive. The ceiling of my barracks room gives the illusion of ventilation with pronounced plastic slits grouped together next to a larger unit, drab gray and ineffective. I have a box fan propped against the screen pointed inward toward my bed, a gentle hum that rolls my green blackout curtains. People around me are convinced winter will be especially harsh this year, but I’m impatient.