I. Ben and I had been in Lima a week when we decided to take an eight-hour bus ride to the mountain town of Huaraz. There, we would acclimatize for a few days while we planned a three-day trek in the Cordillera Blanca mountain range. Huaraz was known as the gateway...
Mr. and Mrs. Miller were not the sort to keep rum in their kitchen cabinets. They would rather keep it out, usually on the glass-topped buffet cart that wheeled its way so elegantly from their hallway down the corridor, to the entertaining lounge (or equally as well...
In the spring, Shane found himself unemployed and living at the mercy of a girl whose face he couldn’t recall. Candace had a cheap walk-up in Columbia Heights, two rooms with a microwave and a toilet and neighbors whose culinary cultures insisted they cook cabbage or...
I always knew you thought I was crazy. I imagined the way you probably talked to your friends about me, telling everyone how I cut her pictures out of our photo albums when—how could I not?—she had nearly destroyed me, us, any possible future. And she was in so many...
My beautician May-Belle feels sorry for them. She says God’ll be in the middle of creating something new or performing some latter-day miracle, and something will come up that Saint Peter, Saint Michael, or even the Virgin Mary Herself can’t handle, and God will just...
When I was a child my days were wild and unpredictable, and I sometimes miss the peaks of emotion present in that old life. Most of the time I abhor the drama of my past when my life centered on the loudness of my hard-drinking parents. But that day in the still young...
