here lies a man who every time he took a walk after dark in his neighborhood always and without fail asked himself why don’t you go for a walk every single night of your life and what’s keeping you from doing this one simple lovely thing more »

I dreamt that it was morning and you said, as if it was no big thing, “Hey, kid, why don’t you take the penis today? I’ve got a lot to do, so I won’t even really notice it’s gone, and it might be fun for you.” “This is what I love about you,” my dream self said to the you in my dream. “Nobody else would ever think to be that generous.” And I meant it, as both my selves. Ultimately, this is a dream about your generosity. “Okay, then. Let me keep it till after my... more »

She says, “Don’t touch that bird or else the mother will never come back,” but I am already holding the baby bird cupped in my hands like my own beating heart. The tiny feet scritching my palms. I carry it home as carefully as a bomb and then my mother finds a box and a dishrag and the bird scrunches into the corner, away from the upside-down lid I have filled with water, away from my finger. “I’ll take good care of you,” I tell it. When we get home from the beach, the sun comes... more »

Late one Saturday afternoon last October, I found myself standing in a Gonzales, Texas, rodeo arena talking politics with a man named Cary, the membership director of a group called the Texas Nationalist Movement. Cary’s focus was on secession – or independence, as he preferred to call it. Having spent the past hour helping lead a rally calling for just that goal, he had now turned to me, the skeptic with a notepad, and launched into the hard facts of why Texas’ freedom from the... more »

Solid black with white letters scrawled in a jagged font. Bold and big are the words, “Kill Em All.” Below, in a smaller juxtaposition, “Let Allah Sort Em Out.” “Here’s how you solve this,” my father said over Christmas dinner, not… more »

They found a body in my river. Until I read the newspaper article my mother sent me from Massachusetts, I didn’t know that the river had a real name, but it does: Fort Pond Brook, a title I will use here and then never again, except to complain, because it is a terrible name: a man’s name, stodgy and staccato, and at odds with the water that floods my street when it rains too hard and withers down into a trickle during the droughts that come in the summer, those dry spells when the town... more »

The train approached Meridian, Mississippi, at midnight. The train was half empty and quiet, but my mind raced, heavy and conflicted, contemplating the events to come. Who are they, these racists pulling you from trains and cars and homes in the night to shoot you and bury you in concrete? I was 18 and on my way to volunteer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the second Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1965. Was I scared? Yes, certainly; but also excited at the prospect... more »

I had just turned ten. The first day back from our summer break, our PE teacher asked us where we had vacationed. While waiting to be called on, I was holding the name Wayne National Forest in my mind and getting nervous about telling the class we went camping, yet again, about thirty minutes away from our home. We never had enough money to go farther. On my turn, I blurted out “Yellowstone!” It was too late to go back. more »

The wind in this place is still new to me, even after a year, a thing both understood and surprising. I first began to notice it because the room in which I write looks to the east, and there is a point in that direction where the land slopes downward in a dramatic fashion. The marrying of terrain and prevailing winds means a consistent updraft works its invisible magic outside my window nearly every day, a magic lifting and cradling of two birds common in this part of the world, red-tail hawks... more »

We sing as we drive - a song we make up about moose. Going on a moose hunt… That's all we have, so we sing this chorus over and over and dance wildly in our seats, beating time on the dashboard. We lost radio reception a while back, soon after we pulled away from the cabin. Before we left, Nick filled three black trash bags with the wet leaves from the gutters while I carefully pulled large sections of broken glass from a splintered window frame and flakes of white paint settled over the... more »

Along with the more famous PBS television programs of the late 80s, Reading Rainbow and Sesame Street, I watched a show called The Letter People. Brightly colored characters shaped like letters of the alphabet frolicked and sang together, all in the course of teaching kindergarteners to read. Classrooms like mine could stock up on the enormous inflatable Letter People, toys that loomed over us six year olds, grinning from atop their bookshelf perches. Distinguishing each character from... more »

Scene: in the backseat of a Jeep, the view cropped ragged by a gray wool blanket wrapped around the camera. Our view, shrunken into tunnel vision, moves in steps and lurches: we see the empty bucket of the driver’s seat, see the front dash and then out the windshield. A blur of color focuses into five figures: Ben, Ben’s contact Jean Claude, the Colonel, and two of the Colonel’s men. The Colonel is wearing an olive green beret, khaki fatigues synched at the waist with an ammo belt. ... more »

Lying is a weird talent in itself. The bigger the lie, the more likely it is to be believed. I once told my college roommate Cassie that my grandmother yodeled for the Queen of Sweden. At the time, my grandmother, although having Swedish heritage in her bloodlines, had never been to Sweden, and I didn’t even know if Sweden had a queen. But I told the lie, and Cassie believed it. She went on to tell that tale for years, and I cringed every time fearing I would be exposed. Years later, I... more »

Apology to a Man I No Longer Love I’m sorry for hiding your favorite Leonard Cohen CD in the bottom of a box of tampons when we were dividing up our stuff after the break-up. I still have it, all these years later, and sometimes forget it wasn’t a gift from you. Apology to a Well-Meaning History Teacher We were as cruel as thirteen-year-olds always are, and didn’t care that you’d escaped a World War by hiding in the dank basement of a strange family’s house. We laughed at... more »

Gary Wayne had a Big Wheel and Down’s syndrome, though our technical term for his condition was “retarded.” I was five. My brother was eight. Gary Wayne was somewhere in between. Matthew and I believed in hell but didn’t think we’d ever go there. After all, we didn’t call Gary Wayne “retarded” to his face. Instead, we called him by his full name, which was the same thing to us. We’d hear him coming before we saw him. He always drove like he was running from a wildfire, his... more »

“Oh man I can’t believe you actually sent it!” Dan shouts, in horror and glee. I lean back in my crumbling wheelie chair and smile wryly. Well, what’s done is done, I guess. “That’ll by twenty-five dollars,” I say, extending my palm expectantly. I am sure I have just committed my most grievous mistake of at least this week. Collecting my hard-earned reward, I retrace my errant steps. *** It started when I saw her going into our college dining hall late one... more »

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Objective : I began work at age 14 to save for a car. Relevant Experience: * Retail Salesman I walked the floor of a costume and accessory shop to encourage sales. Leering masks of the worst celebrities, augmented into even more ghoulish versions, hung sentinel over us on hooks angled into their empty craniums: our premier items. Halloween theme songs looped over the span of the six-hour shift. Of course, obvious boredom was forbidden. I chatted with my biker coworker, even rode... more »

The village of Tehri faces certain death. When construction of the world’s fifth largest hydropower-producing dam is completed, Tehri (in the north Indian state of Uttarakhand) will be flooded and over 10,000 people inhabiting the surrounding area will lose the place their families have called home for over 200 years. One man refuses to let his home go gently into that good night. Sunderlal Bahuguna is a slight, wiry man with a full head of snowy hair made even whiter by his bronzed skin.... more »

For a long time, when asked what profession I was in, I would reply by saying that I was a professional milk steamer. I worked behind the counter at a small café in Harvard Square, Cambridge, in the shadow of the most prestigious university in the nation. For some reason, the morning shift was often slow, so the other employees and I would kill time telling stories. Like the one about the store being owned by the mob, which would explain how the company could afford to pay two employees seven... more »