When the father arrived home to his squalid, Lower East Side tenement building, he was exhausted. He paused at the door to pose for a Jacob Riis photo, and then trudged though the entryway. The grit of coal from the furnace in the oil refinery still covered his face. This, despite the fact that we worked on the docks hauling fish. His apartment was in the rear of the building: a cramped, filthy space overlooking a pile of rubbish that the realtor had described as a “quaint fixer-upper with a partial city view.” He approached the door, removed a rat...
Through the veil she was almost as pretty as I'd wished she would have been the first time we met for real, in real life, in person on the street. The love of my life.
I remembered that in certain photographs she had this quality, like an angel or maybe just someone who thought they were one, so strung out they could touch the sky. She wasn't that pretty, no pixie dust queen, just another girl who liked to make faces. But I think I love her.
You hope that, and I hoped that, the love of my life--because that's...
Six minutes...
Was that really all he had left? Three hundred sixty seconds? Well, less than that, now.
He looked into the eyes of his family, gathered around him atop the hill.
What was a man supposed to do in a situation like this? Pray? Meditate? Impart wisdom? Plan some last words? They'd have to be really special... You only got one chance at Last Words.
He thought for a moment. Two hundred seconds, now.
He nodded imperceptibly, straightened his back, and reached for a pair of scissors. With a confident, even snip, he pulled away a handful of hair...
When he said he'd take me far away, to a world I'd never seen, I had expected more than this.
"You're just seeing the scaffolding."
"What is there that isn't scaffolding? It's...there's nothing else there. It's hollow. It's broken."
He covered my eyes with his hands, pointed me in a direction and hissed "walk" in my ear.
I had presumed this was going to be a date. Clearly I was incorrect.
I could feel the ground beneath my feet alter, and suddenly everything felt different - I was enclosed, and yet not enclosed at all (there was light spilling in,...
Gradually, that was how the world where it was okay to be a geek, a fangirl, a dork, herself, came into being.
It started with an acquaintance who knew the animated series who became a best friend.
It grew with a sister who accepted everything and opened her eyes to new worlds.
But it finally became real to her when she met him, the boy who pushed her fringe out of her eyes and led her onto the dance floor when she was sad. Who had moved closer in the fog and who had taken her hand without asking. The...
"I'm a monster," said my son, dangling my old Nikon camera behind his back.
"I can see that," I said. "What's your special monster power?"
"Scary faces!" he said. "I can make a scary face that makes you make a scaredy face!"
I instantly put on a poker face. "I'd like to see you try."
He puckered his face for a few seconds, then went, "Graaahh," and screwed up his eyes and stuck out his tongue.
"Eeeeeeee!!" I cried, opening my eyes and mouth as wide as I could.
As smoothly as a three-year-old can, he pulled out the camera...
“We were thrown overboard, casted onto the waters left to our demise! They captured us, tortured our very souls mercilessly with wicked demands! ”
“No, I saw you guys, you had parachutes, and falling in the water were totally your own fault.”
“But we were held hostage, left in a God-forsaken tower all tied up with (mostly) nothing to eat or drink! Only when rays of the forgotten sun poked through the crevices of the sturdy wooden door, were we forcefully fed with the remains of frogs and sour wine!”
“Oh, you mean the balcony? Isn’t access to the torch...
Daring to be noticed for the first time in her life, she pushed her chair back and stood up.
Mrs. Baer had not picked her for the reading group, but that didn't matter, because it didn't mean she wasn't good enough, it just meant that Mrs. Baer didn't KNOW how well she could read! Mom would say it, loud and clear Emily could hear it in her head, "If you'd just made yourself noticed, Emily, then you would not have been ignored!" This is what Mom always told both of her older sisters when they became too meek.
"You get...
Absent. The roots were absent but you could still see them. When you burn a stump, you often end up with a chunk of its heart that doesn't turn to ash. The interesting thing is how the fire always seems to follow the roots, no matter how deep they go, burning away every trace of them. Sometimes, even a year later, a fire can rekindle from deep in the earth where it was banked in some hidden location. Looking down from above, you can see the faithful reproduction of the root system only it's just air. Hollows that disappear into...
Midnight on the roof. She stood alone, shivering, cold, the wind blowing her hair across her face, blanket wrapped around her. It had gone all wrong at the party, and she knew it. She had meant to approach him, to say she was sorry, to ask him to forgive her. But instead, she froze, watching carefully from across the room while her friends chatted on, oblivious. He never once looked her way. Did he know she was there? Could he feel her presence? The truth she had spoken aloud in anger only a few days before seemed not so true...