Thirty-six hours into the malpractice review, they finally ask the question that matters: Would I have done anything differently? I stare at the MRI showing Sage Cohen’s glioblastoma, wrapped around her temporal lobe like a dark star collapsing. The imaging was clear, the path obvious. And still, she hemorrhaged on my table. […]
By the dim light of a dying candle, Grandmother’s hunched back looms over your small, quivering body, fever high. She presses horn against stone—withered skin pulled taut over smooth bone. Smooth bone hard against jagged, carved rock, pour water, mix—the murky water is magic. When did her hands stop looking like
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I was five days overdue. “Go fetch the washing off the line,” Mom said, “let’s see if that gets things started.” So I grunted down over my belly, grabbed the laundry basket, and lumbered through the yard in bare feet. I glanced back. Mom was watching my slow progress from the back step,
Cold winds blow from the north and lift the albatross high over the bay. From below, the cracking of breaking wood follows loud booms of cannon blasts. A great battle is taking place in a war that has been waged for years. Flames erupt from some of the ships, and giant
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Kat sleeps with the data. Old school, USB, under the Mouse pillow. Caught the methane release in real time, live, last night, by chance. Was messing around in her former company’s servers, suspecting they had an imperceptible delay on a few key sensors. Less than a second,
A flipped boat, he clings to the metal bench seat slick with mossy water, his feet spasming in the unknown depths below him. Because at sixteen, there’s something fucked up about not knowing how to float or tread water. He had skipped swimming lessons because he couldn’t imagine a world where he wouldn’t know how
Each Death Gets Us Closer Read More »
B e watchful of voices that shout shouldn’t, mustn’t, don’t. They said she shouldn’t climb up the fire escape and whisper conversations with the night sky. It was one thing to perch on the roof’s edge, feet dangling, and look down on the city below, taking in the glow of neon lights. But who was
The Wise Internal Voice Read More »
T here was no room for fear at the circus. As infants, my sister Jenny and I learned to walk by balancing our child-soft legs on the gravity-defying materials of tightwires and bouncing ropes. We were birds, a fear of tumbling
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D avid loved untaxed Bauhaus steel. Especially when it was at a Vancouver 6.7 percent discount. If he included the security envelope with fifty one-dollar bills, the total cost of two coffee tables, a new kitchen table, and matching bedside lamps was $9,650. Sure, his five-year-old daughter, Elise–who he’d coached not to say a word
For the Love of Fries Read More »
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