Flaubert wrote his famous quote in the mid-19th century, after he’d left his bourgeois law career and was in the Middle East enjoying prostitutes and engaging in orgasmic activity with a 14-year old Maronite boy. He finally contracted syphilis, showing just how much he risked for his subversion. Perhaps the advice, so oft quoted by literati, is really about the writer needing the bourgeois life in order to push against it.
Continue reading… "The Subversive Writer"“Your father and I have picked out the guts of our coffins,” my mother’s first words after I push open their kitchen door. “Isn’t that great?” she adds, walking over and standing close. She touches my shoulder and smiles.
I hold the door ajar, wanting to rush back outside—and breathe, to not answer. A year and a half ago her dark humor would have been amusing. Now, with her dementia symptoms
Continue reading… "Wave to Ron"“Open the gate for the High King.”
Clad in sable and gold, a figure strides forward. “Dum da da da,” singsongs my son: “the King.”
“No, not him, the High King. This one’s the High King,” Finn declares.
“And then the invaders—”
“Wait — where’s the King’s jousting thing?”
Continue reading… "Guys and Dolls"The girl at the computer terminal turns and smiles as though she’s glad I’m here, and I step through the open doorway out of hallway dimness into fluorescent brightness, organized clutter and the intimacy of the small room. She’s blonde, in her thirties, a little plump and wearing no make-up. I imagine her mothering small, well-behaved children when she’s not here. If I’ve seen her before, I don’t remember.
Continue reading… "Blood Draw, 1994"Blue carpet paves the way to the pew where we always sit, four rows back on the left. My younger brother and I are 5 and 9, too old to bring toys to church, so we draw on the bulletins or tear them to fold into rumpled origami creations, and try to sit still. It is communion Sabbath, a practice Adventists observe four times a year. This means mid-service, silver trays of fluted single-ounce cups filled with grape juice and unleavened crackers are
Continue reading… "Hundreds of Ways to Kneel"The edge between land and sea may be the world’s oldest border. Walking by the shore, where the ocean grinds against sand and rock, you see how life thrives along this boundary. Algae grow on the rocks, seaweed grows in the shallows, and animals feed on both.
Continue reading… "Borderlines"The mule deer come so close to the house during winter that you notice their coarse hair and the thinness of their legs. They have descended from the higher elevations to forage in hay fields and to knock birdseed from our feeder. When they are this close, you see the physical marks of their season-to-season existence, scars from barbed
Continue reading… "February"The gun had always been there, in the brown leather shaving kit on the top shelf of the linen closet. I think he put it there when we moved into the house and we kids were small enough that we couldn’t reach it. Then he forgot about it. It wasn’t even his. It had belonged to my mother’s father, and it had history that was better
Continue reading… "Mirrors"It is a year of dead and dying cockroaches. I wake up each morning, my bedroom floor a battlefield of tiny reddish-brown corpses, with a few near-fatalities scattered in between,their six-legs flailing in desperate attempts to right themselves.
Continue reading… "Fading"The boatman switched off the motor and we floated in the silence of the swamp. In the light of near sunset, I lifted my binoculars and traveled the leaves of trees until I latched onto gold-red fur that resolved into the body of a proboscis monkey. Nasalis larvatus.
Continue reading… "Hollowed Ground: A Hole In Borneo"