Sometimes her name is Mary, but mostly she’s called Mama. She doesn’t know my name. She doesn’t know I exist yet. I can’t tell up from down, right from wrong.…

I like the providence of names. Move a letter here or there, or leave them as they were, and they come to mean a whole new person. The name itself…

I watch you through the window, you and your brother, spinning each other on the tire swing. He sits with his butt in the center of the tire, his legs…

I follow the grooves of the wood, tracing back, remembering how it felt to swing all on my own. Little legs pumping, six years old, lifting higher and higher, teetering…

My grandmother’s attic holds more yellow light and tinier hallways than it did in my youth. After dreaming of what is left of her, my feet froze when it was…

I’m six years old when I see the poltergeist. My father is long gone, and my mother is watching TV, and my brother is upstairs, clashing He-Men together in violent…

“You two would make the cutest kids,” the nurse said. She helped me transfer my husband – post-anesthesia and on painkillers after his septoplasty; the world still spongy to him.…

The doctor’s sentences pulse with medical terminology. His voice sounds distant and distorted by the pumping of blood through my ear drums. The room begins to spin. Here comes the…

We set up our tent in a campsite midway between the ocean and the salt marshes. Ecosystems crowd together on Assateague island, like a microcosm of the continent: saltwater and…

He pours already boiling water from a kettle to a pan for eggs. I tell him I’ve not seen it done that way before. Saves time, he says, and I…

When she picked me up from arrivals for the first time, she was wearing a soft jeans-coloured overall amounting to little more than a tank top and shorts. Her bare…

Grandma always said the best apple pie starts with fruits with the sharpest bite. My house is filled with Christmas carols, bright and clear in digital remasters. We always made…