❤️ There in the cold hospital waiting room, we gathered together to watch my oldest sister die. As usual, I sat alone and apart. The only person I even liked in this motley group was currently in another room, heavily sedated on a ventilator. If my oldest sister had been sitting next to me, we…
❤️ “Stop that. It’s disgusting.” I rolled down the car window for some fresh air. As if the smells emanating from my son’s laundry bag weren’t nauseating enough. “Mom, it’s not my fault,” laughed my 19-year-old son, secretly proud of his foul emissions. “The dining hall serves only three types of food: fried, deep fried,…
A thing there is whose voice is one; / Whose feet are four and two and three. 🜋 🜋 🜋 Four feet. A baby crawls over to his father reading a newspaper at the breakfast table. He pulls at his father’s pants leg. The father picks him up, while folding the newspaper open to the…
🏅 Act I is the easiest part to write as you don’t even like him at first, unusual considering how hard and how fast you fall. On your first date, he asks what type of restaurant you prefer. Idiot, you think. We aren’t going to get into any place decent this late on a Saturday…
You are warned against drinking and dating older men, especially those dark-eyed ones from New Jersey. Upon meeting Frank for the first time, your Virginia gentlewoman of a mother calls him swarthy. Being the son of Italian immigrants is not a crime, you cry, reminding her that The Godfather is just a movie. The second…
She wasn’t sure about these people, clutching copies of their latest writings, ready to be pilloried by perfect strangers around a public library conference room table. “Are you new?” asked an overly friendly librarian. “I’m new,” she decided. It still wasn’t too late to turn around and leave as the stench of uncomfortably conspicuous introverts…
As the relentless Saturday dawn poured through the bedroom’s faux wood blinds, the peroxide blonde gave one last heave then awkwardly dismounted. Wordlessly, she gathered up her things and strode naked into the bathroom, apparently used to the routine. Tom Mosley lay very still. There were sounds of a toilet flushing, a faucet running, and…
As usual, my father stalked into the room, quickly scanning assorted relatives for the most suitable person with whom to trouble himself. Taking inventory of the stock and trade in the claustrophobic meeting room at Winston’s Funeral Home & Crematory, I felt his slate eyes gloss over me, registering nothing on his end but vague…
When Mom died ten years ago, dad practically did too, even though the death certificate would list his official passing with today’s date. There are couples and then there are soulmates; mom and dad were the latter. They didn’t need to finish each other’s sentences because they could converse without speaking. Theirs was a love…
🏆 🏆 ❤️ It is ungodly hot and Hamlet should shut up. “You cannot call it love, for at your age the heyday in the blood is tame, it’s humble, and waits upon the judgment,” over-enunciates one of the actors while wildly gesticulating with a plastic human skull. The skull does not normally appear until…