When I was eighteen, and she was sixteen, I took my sister with me to get what would be my first tattoo—her name.
I hadn’t known to research tattoo artists; ...
A 1977 divorce was trailblazing, and a custodial father was positively extraterrestrial. I was six.
A serpentine driveway tethered our farmhouse to the count...
In the Russian Taiga, the forests west of Moscow, there are places where compasses do not work. Where there is so much lead in the trees, so many bullets hidden...
Maybe it began in the cool, green darkness beneath my mother’s rhododendron. Somehow I must have sensed, even at eight years old, that what I was doing was wron...
I tried to count the blisters on my feet while you watched from the doorway. At age five, you were a year younger than me, just outside a dirty bathroom in a ho...
You should have had a raucous Irish wake, the kind you see in movies. A bottle should have been passed from mourner to mourner, each telling stories about you, ...
We trudge through the cold as if burdened by stones. But not as if burdened. We are burdened for real, just not by stones. It’s the day’s gravity that weighs us...
On the night of the 2016 presidential election, my wife and I went out for dinner and drinks rather than sit in front of the television watching the state-by-st...
I bought flowers at the grocery store even though I didn’t mean to buy flowers at the grocery store.
Fresh flowers are for afternoons when you feel shiny and...
