The first thing I do when I get on the ice is ask.
The first thing I do when I get on the ice is ask.
After the stop-and-fix baths, my father enters the kitchen. In his hand, an eight-by-ten black-and white photo, dripping.
“What is it?” “An ascot tie. Vintage.”
Someone brushes past, dropping, “Hey,” in my ear and, I discover, mint chocolate Milano cookies in my hand.
Most nights, my toddler rejects sleep.
The pub owner wanted more customers, so he let a fortune teller set up her table behind a beaded curtain in the corner.
I wheeled into the Lufthansa check-in line two hours early behind a bald, sixty-something dude decked out entirely in Patagonia-wear.
When the garbage man rides by, I pull up my top.
On Valentine’s Day, a group of fifth grade girls wave at her in the library.
Can I touch your beard? I ask my best friend, and he says yes, but I’m shy suddenly, wondering if it will feel prickly under fingers that haven’t touched a man, any man, since coming out in 1989.
I can still smell the gasoline, feel the airbags deploy, and the crushing weight of the metal pinning me down.
PLOP. The wasp plunges from the heavens into Maria’s glass of cider, right in front of our eyes.
“I rolled a six.” “Okay,” says the GM, “you get a tent.”
I ease the pressure to coax the string to fuller resonance.
. . . zooming through Allahabad’s lawless traffic, my bicycle racing sixteen-wheeler trucks, I’m navigating Google Maps with one hand, readjusting my N95 dustmask with the other.
. . . we’re almost leg to leg, sipping cocktails in a candlelit lounge.
I take a hit and remember why D.A.R.E. exists.
Steeped in my English major but flirting with medicine, I sat on my dorm room floor and listened through the phone to my father’s cynical perspective on being a doctor.
The chill seeps into my flesh, prickles at the skin revealed by too-short sleeves and chills the layer of sweat just beneath.
I peer off the deck at the swimming pool far below, its underwater light illuminated purple.