Posts in True Stories
My Honda Civic, July 1989

It was a night like any other that summer. Short skirt, fishnet stockings, thick lines of black eyeliner, ruby red lips, and dancing. I’d had a line of coke before the night began, and part of a bottle of cheap wine—seriously cheap, dollar-a-bottle Strawberry Hill. It was early in the night for us, a hallway mark of 1 a.m. David Bowie’s “Suffragette City” was at the part of the song where everyone screams along.

Read More
Why I Stayed

Why didn’t I follow my first impulse and bolt out into the night? If my boyfriend came home and hit me in the face, I would have left. Instead, he broke a lamp, smiling, while I begged him to stop. That smile terrified me. But he didn’t touch me, and all he said were the words I screamed at him when he stumbled into the room drunk for the third night in a row, turning them into questions.

Read More
Breaking Up With My Breasts

Dear Breasts,

It’s been almost two years since I saw you. My last memory of us is you hidden underneath a checkered teal hospital gown that flapped against my naked bottom. I couldn’t look at you. I pictured the doctors cutting you off and resting you on a silver platter next to the operating table. Two jello molds, each with a cherry on the top. The whole thing felt surreal.

Read More
Detach

When I was a little girl between the ages of six and eleven, I loved Barbie dolls. In my child-mind, Barbies (not just Barbie, but the other dolls in the line like Ken, Skipper, and Midge), with their anatomically incorrect, smooth, hairless, nipple-less, sex-organ-less bodies, silky hair, and infinite array of matching outfits represented the untarnished, uncomplicated yet glamorous life I might build for myself.

Read More
The Curtain Falls

March 14, 2020

The days are getting longer, but winter still holds New England in its chilly grip. Looking out at the empty harbor, no boats bob merrily on moorings, and the still dark water reflects the last rays of the setting sun and scattered streetlights. John and I sit in a half-empty theater, with vacant seats clustering around small groups of two or three people.

Read More
Maybe My Vagina Is Depressed Too

My pelvic floor is broken. The PT slides her fingers inside me and presses on a spot at the back of my vagina. A jolt of pain shoots through the inside of my ass. Not exactly my ass, it’s too far forward, but like the outside of the inside of my ass. It’s a hot spark deep inside where the tissue is tender and aching beneath the rock-hard surface of nebulous vaginal-anal space.

Read More
Feral

Besides my husband, I have lived with no other being longer than Mullen. When we lived in Austin, after I suffered a miscarriage, my husband saw a pitiful ginger tabby kitten at an adoption fair. If we had any reservations, they were nullified when the adoption volunteer gave us Mullen’s history; his was the saddest tale in the shelter. A few weeks old, he had been found in a plastic bag, riddled with fleas and mange, cast away on the side of Mo-Pac.

Read More
Of Time and Other Giants

The salt-wetted air tangs your tongue and sprays your skin, but still the tide feels strangely distant. Under normal circumstances you would gaze at the steady horizon, trying to absorb the enormity of the ever-shifting ocean. Its depth, its strength, its unknowable currents and flavors.

Read More
Daylight

The first playlist I made for someone came in the form of a mix CD that I’d burned on an old Dell desktop computer. It was a summer mix, meant to be played in my best friend’s pink Sony portable CD player as we skateboarded and biked down the backroads of our small Florida town.

Read More
A Silver Urn

I grabbed orange-colored poster board from the art section at Walgreens, then joined my wife in the check-out line. I made sure to stay six feet apart from the person in front of us, even though I'm double-masked. I felt the customer behind standing too close and turned around to see she was not wearing a mask.

Read More
Jan

I had never been to a funeral. I never went to a wake, never stood by an open grave as a priest read scripture. All I knew of the ritual of mourning was what I had seen in movies. Sometimes I idly entertained the notion of someone I knew dying, just to imagine what the funeral would be like. How would I act?

Read More
I Miss You All the Time

My mother passed away when I was eight years old, and for some time after that, I journaled to cope with difficult feelings. She wrote in beautiful notebooks while she was sick. I suppose I was trying to find a connection. I shared thoughts and feelings about a variety of topics: what pony I was going to ride that week in my horseback riding lessons, stories about my dolls’ lives, and random emotions.

Read More