Prognostication

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

Shoot him 'fore he run now
J. had a freezer full of goose breasts riddled with shot. His family owned property on Broad Creek with a duck blind right against the water, where the menfolk, clad in camouflage, would sit on brisk fall mornings, guns poised. He showed me the blind that first summer, took my hand and led me through a tunnel of cornstalks gone brown. We sat close on the austere bench, hidden behind grass that had become hoarse with whispering over the years. I am sure he kissed me in that humid July air because we did a lot of that then, sweet

Gorilla story
The house teeters above you in a nimbus of red light. A pillar of cracked, uneven steps capped by burning jack-o-lanterns ends at the front door, where cackles and howls animate the night air. “A real witch lives there,” the boy next to you says as he tentatively places a cardboard hoof on the bottom step. You hold your mother’s hand a little tighter and keep walking. Down the street, a sickly-looking woman with a black pointy cap perches by a cauldron. She waves her gnarled hand, pours a ladle of steam into a styrofoam cup. You start to run, but your mother catches you by the collar

Living proof at my fingertips
It was one of those conversations that I'm tired of having, but I couldn't seem to stop myself.Mr. Trinkle and I were standing against the wall at the Fox Theater in Oakland, this over-the-top restored venue from the late 1920s, drinking our beers and waiting for the group

The low spark of a high-heeled boy
Here was the scene: my four-year-old son wearing a pair of old high heels, a canary-yellow birthday party hat on his head, grasping a sword in either hand. It was another one of his many guises, a funny mix of feminine and masculine, underpinned by the dark potential for violence. He gave my husband a birthday hat and a sword (we have a large supply of both) and they began a battle, two "spirits" hashing it out. Soon after, the kid swapped out the swords for a stick "gun." If you are my Facebook friend, maybe you saw one of the resulting photographs, which I put up with the heading &l