“My father’s a writer.” When Seth’s turn came around in class he said what he’d been taught to say. He could have more truthfully announced, “My father’s in marketing,” but no, his parents had drilled the writer line into him,… Continue Reading
Leon’s pinky wraps around my pinky underneath the desk. Our hands hang linked in the gap between our laps; his warm, mine cold. Facing forward, I wonder if he’s looking at me. Wonder what sort of eyes go with his… Continue Reading
The dilemma — I knew even as a nine-year-old boy to be a “good problem” — was I’d unwrapped a blue plastic horse from Mrs. Golding during the fourth-grade classroom Christmas party and all the girls wanted horses, as girls… Continue Reading
He still sang Verdi in the shower. She listened and planned to leave him. Twenty years ago, when she was seventeen and smitten, she’d considered his singing romantic: her elegant, cultured calculus teacher serenading her while he soaped his graying… Continue Reading
“Jacob, Julien, Esther…” Of all the things in all of the world that Marinette could do, her most favorite thing of all was to sit in the center of the patch of flowers behind her school at recess and name… Continue Reading