Prognostication

8:37, Saturday morning
Tom cups his hands around the egg, his square palms and stubby fingers keeping it safe. He finds eggs fascinating, the weight they hold when they are fresh, uncooked, the way hard-boiling changes their heft. His mother handles them so gently, too, admonishes him not to dangle one over the hard kitchen tile. Yes, they are to be treated gently, unless you want to cook with them, in which case great violence is the key.Every Saturday he and his mother make pancakes and he watches the drama unfold. The eggs,

The noises of destruction
There was an oak tree just outside the back window. Brown leaves clung to it through the winter, unwilling to sever their ties until they were forced out by new growth. Some nights, when I was tired of waiting and had a little too much to drink, I would slip out in the dark and throw my empties at it. My mother did the same thing – tossed cheap wine glasses against rustic mantles, flung half-full bottles of Sangre de Toro against cracked linoleum. Broken glass every time. Me? I lobbed 7-ounce Budweiser bottles here, old jelly-jars-turned-cocktail glasses there. Every single one landed with an unsatisfying thud in the frosted grass or clinked against mildewed siding.

Away from here
We kept on digging that night, pushed through soil rich and dark, encountered earthworms as long as Joe’s middle finger. He had a trowel and I had a pick-axe, but most of the time we used our hands, took off our gloves and did the dirty work directly. Nobody had told the little one about what had really happened to Tristan. I mean, he knew he was sick and saw the old cat collapse on the kitchen floor, heard the pained meow. He saw me cry and hyperventilate and gather calming forces, but we couldn&r

Lure
I flicked a career away as easily as I tossed down shots of vodka. The brown shoes and heavy overcoat, the thick wool suit in regulation blue, opaque hosiery that marked red rails around my waist, that made a serpentine path from my navel down: the uniform is all I remember, how the wool smelled alive in the rain, the flecks of mud that the shoes, too high for the job, splattered against my ankles as I walked.If Robert hadn’t kissed me, I probably would have stayed. We wer

And five days later cold
It started with Maggie May's post on how one could possibly cope with losing a child. Or maybe it started before then, in my first grief at nine over the death of my grandmother, the grief that morphed into my obsession with Ouija boards, seances, and ghosts. Or possibly it was before even that, sparked by the hit-and-run death of the unpredictable feline Sheba, o