Nevermind that she is not the product of giants, my daughter Jessica is two years into adolescence—age fifteen—and has already grown to six-foot four. Her mother is an average-sized woman, much shorter than I am, and I’m firmly under six feet tall. But my grandfathers were tall men, over six feet the both of them, …
We were on the front porch waiting for the ambulance. Grandma, with her Alzheimer’s, didn’t know what she was waiting for. I watched her rocking in her wooden rocker, her bright and bewildered eyes going from my face to Grandpa’s (I’d called him PawPaw when I was a kid but switched to Grandpa about fifteen …
They poked at dripping garbage bags with blunt, white nails. They nosed squirrel carcasses in the street. They chased down mice and chewed them up on the spot, their yellowed teeth raised triumphant in the air. We hadn’t thought they liked food fresh, but we could see them in our gardens plain as the Lord’s …
I called Sissy after work about my living room. The interior wall had developed a soft spot near the ceiling, a sort of brownish smudge like a bruise on a peach. My aunt was good with structural matters, and I was hoping she’d have some insight. Instead, she had news of her own. “Your mother …
Donna’s husband had been underground for twenty-one hours, and she missed many things about him. She missed the sound of him humming in the bathroom; how when she said, “What are you humming?” he’d yell, “I’m not humming!” and then start doing it again. She missed his short-sleeved shirts against his hairy upper arms. She …
The wind has been fighting the cyclists ever since they entered South Dakota. A hurricane that tore up the Gulf Coast a week ago has made its way inland and is now reduced to simply battering Olivia’s cheek, relentlessly, with every pedal stroke as she makes her way east through the Great Plains. The hurricane …
Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend. —John Singer Sargent Portrait The first portrait Jules Johnson saw, really saw, was a watercolor she held in her hands in her uncle’s frame shop: a woman seated on a rock at the edge of a river. The subject’s shoes were off, her jeans …
Prompt for Causal Argument essay: Using the techniques we have discussed this semester (thesis statement, active verbs, unity and coherence, refutation of a counterargument, the “funnel” approach to introductory and concluding paragraphs, etc.), trace the causes and effects of an issue. Potential subjects include: climate change, the unemployment rate, the cost of health insurance or …
She tells me that she is sitting in her office chair on a spring afternoon, and the windows are warm and yellow from the sun and the vinyl is cold on her neck. There is a tiffany lamp on her desk, lit, and underneath her feet are bare. Her client is on the couch with …
In the garage, you show your fiancé Clara what you have made for your child’s gender reveal party. It is heavy, built from the scavenged metal base of a lawn umbrella and a four-foot length of pipe. You felt ingenious in the process of welding it, using equipment you borrowed from a friend, but in …