The hotel was gabled stone building, fitted with a conical turret and Gothic Revival windows. We found it on a narrow curving highway, just under the south side of a high truss bridge we crossed accidentally several times because the combination of left-side driving and roundabouts are like kryptonite for my father. The weather was bleak, even for the Scottish Highlands. We trundled in, dripping, over the threadbare floral carpet. The walls were high, papered […]
It begins at the end of August 2019, the week before Labor Day. I have returned bedraggled, overstuffed, feeling old and tired after the second of the three music festivals I committed myself to this summer. So grossed out by my own indulgence, I make a spreadsheet labeled ATONEMENT, which I will use to get my life in order, tracking exercise, food, money, all the things that seem to be spiraling out of control, and […]
Sometime around the beginning of my eighth-grade year, the most popular girl in my class came to school in a tie-dyed Beatles t-shirt and Birkenstocks with her brand name soccer shorts. And suddenly, seemingly overnight, all the girls that had been crushing on George Michael started talking about Jerry Garcia all the time. It was 1989, but at Asheville Junior High School, anyway, the sixties had properly begun. There were a lot of reasons for […]
I’m a cis woman and I’m heterosexual-ish. I have moments. I have slightly more than incidental tendencies, according to some one or another Kinsey scale test I took in college. There is Samira Wiley. There was Katherine Hepburn in “Sylvia Scarlett” and a fair number of 21st century women who look a little like Katherine Hepburn in “Sylvia Scarlett.” There is the fantasy version of me that I do not and will not ever look […]
The moth thudded against the window at 11:45. Ringer jumped, even though she knew it was coming. “Never fails to surprise me,” she said. I looked up at the plate glass. The moth glowed milky green, its thorax furred, its eyes fiery orange. The dimensions were preposterous, nearly primeval. One of the Fairview boys slapped his fist against the glass and goggled. “That wing-ed fucker is as big as my hand.” I dug around in […]
An elegant American woman walks into a famous biergarten flanked by her two daughters. The eldest, an overweight depressed twenty-four-year-old in a frayed gray wool sweater and a thrift-store jacket steps haltingly and gazes out over the arched vaults and the massive novelty beer steins clanked against the long tables emblazoned with the primitive scrawl of past patrons in time to the Oom-Pah band playing on a distant stage. She might look studious to you, […]
(In honor of Spring Cleaning: Seven Days. Seven Dresses. This is Day Six. Day Five is here) My favorite movie as a kid was “The Wizard of Oz.” I don’t know when it became my favorite movie. I simply came into consciousness so strongly identifying with Dorothy Gale that I insisted on a wardrobe of blue gingham pinafores and settings at the dinner table for the Scarecrow, Lion, and Tin Man (and occasionally a […]
