??? I hear a strange clicking sound, look down the semi-dark corridor, and see a shadowy figure near the second of the two cells. A man is holding what looks like an old coffee can in his left hand. When he withdraws his right hand from the can, I see that it’s...
1. I’m not eating again. Not because I don’t want to, but because it’s making me sick again. And my limbs feel like sand again, feel like hanging on the ends of puppet strings except no one is pulling them. That’s the problem: he’s not pulling them. So I wake up,...
Imagine Nichols Avenue, because Nichols is where we are headed. Granddad Alvarez does not take the usual Sunday scenic route: through downtown D.C., past the Lyndon B. Johnson White House and the sunburnt, sign-shaking Vietnam protesters. Instead, we hook a right from...
Author’s Note My heart is with the people of Turkey in the wake of this terrible news out of Istanbul. Writers always leave things out of their finished products, and in many cases, like the one that follows, they wring their hands about it. This was one of...
The earth was cracked and troubled in Washington, D.C. If only you’d been listening, you would have decoded the garbled whisperings of Auntie Kay’s rapid decline, a sampaguita wilting, just like your bleeding hearts in summer, hot as morning mouth. Instead, you...
