Mom and I ran to the end of a just-built trail around a lake that formed when the river flowed for a hundred days straight and flooded a basin that was once 800 single-family homes. No, flood is the wrong name for the rains, which came and came and came until we accepted that we …
She was a senior at Eastview and her name was Tally Wright and he was this younger left-handed kid called Dinsmore. She was a Libra and she didn’t believe in ghosts and she was thinking seriously of Hollywood and he was an inch taller than she and he’d read fewer books and they’d never spoken …
1. They never remembered me, even after I’d been going there for two years, which meant I got asked the same questions each visit. Did I have the day off from work? Did I live nearby? Both had hearing loss, so I had to shout all my answers, often twice. Both smoked, and their hands …
I wouldn’t call myself a muse. We were just fooling around, but it was regular enough that I started to spend nights and stay for breakfast even though I don’t really eat breakfast, but I always pretended I wanted scrambled eggs and herbed goat cheese and half of his berry smoothie because he thought I …
1. There is a photograph of my home in Karachi. If you look carefully, you can see me waving from the second story window, my three brothers playing cricket in the street below. In the photograph I am wearing a white dress. I am about eight years old. Both of my parents are sitting on …
All over town the euonymus is as red as you’ve ever seen it, bright bushes of flame dotting the landscape. You think of blood but also tell yourself to look up that passage in the Bible about Moses and the bush. Everyone says it is a gorgeous autumn, more vivid than it has been in …
The botanist made a lot of money breeding soybeans that would grow in dust. He didn’t care much for the money and had no interest in knowing how much of it he had. He lived in a cheap motel and wore clothes from second-hand stores. His advancement in soybean horticulture came through a combination of …
Episode One It opens on a summer day outside a coal-burning power plant on the coast of Lake Erie. 2016. Nick, about forty, is dressed in a blue Oxford shirt and khaki slacks—the uniform of the mild-mannered, prestige TV protagonist. His wife, Sabrina, thirty-five, is dressed in a blue t-shirt that reads “Save Yourself” across …
I created the Wikipedia entry for Daniel M. Sherenton as a joke. It would be months before I realized the full, unhappy consequences of this decision. I was scheduled to visit my family in the northern suburb of Detroit where I’m from, and I had planned to boast, at some point during the trip, that …
I tell Algo nice try, but Anthony Keidis is all wrong. Yeah, RHCP is the right decade, but Kiedis’s voice is too blue spotlight, too broad strokes, straight petting, warm corner of the swimming pool. His voice is a tongue pressing too hard in a spot where I need soft, erratic pressure. To be fair, …