Certainly, I admired before I met you, a person who was doing what I could not imagine, and not for yourself but for others, the way animals adopt lost souls of [...]

My little sister heard about the monks who slept in coffins the better to understand life so she asked my brother to make her one. He took some lumber from a half-finished [...]

This era will be remembered as our Vichy period, that shadowy era in France where the Nazi collaborators sought to blend in with the general population, but were continuously [...]

I went for a walk last night. A block in I heard something odd nearby, looked down, found it was the new family dog, a recent rescue, usually too timid to even look at me. Who [...]

On the third morning of the conference I ducked into Whole Foods for breakfast and there she was again, the tall young barista with the two-toned hair, horn rimmed glasses and [...]

Even before he got out of high school, Teedub told people he might as well be an orphan. Not for any attention, just to heave the truth out there. Trying on the old man’s [...]

On those nights when our parents fought, we crawled into their closet and closed the door. The muffled sensation of darted-words hammered at our backs as we dug through the [...]

“Don’t tell your father,” Mom would say, folding a lottery ticket and slipping it into her purse. Poor people’s tax, Dad scoffed every time he spotted the Washington [...]

Back when, I remember coming across this story all the time (most likely the same year I found The Smiths and quit the entire state of Mississippi [and all I knew there] and [...]

Shiny things hung from the young man’s beltloops, most noticeably a silver tape measure, which he stretched between my doorways. I love these country homes, he [...]

Dandelion Every year about this time I thumb through a Rolodex of names—my names, all the possible ones, everything I’ve heard whispered or shouted my way, in [...]

Daniel Berrigan tells a story about a conqueror who comes into our city. He is a huge, superhuman figure, and is preceded by rumors of invincibility. He has conquered [...]

Begin Begin with a thing. Make it a sparrow. A sparrow clinging to the stem of an Easter Lily. Make the sparrow silent. We don’t want too many voices this early [...]

COWBOY BOOTS Sometimes an urge takes hold of us and pulls us onto the dance floor even though we only want to sip our drink and observe. I don’t mean one of those [...]

On the day we flee town, we will want the neighborhood to know what happened. We will tell stories about our stepfather to the kind and not-so-kind men on our street, to the [...]