Someone, probably twenty years ago, bought me a pizza stone. Probably my wife but might have been my sister, but I think it was my wife. For the first five years, I used it to bake loaves of challah or…
View writingWhat if it isn’t what we think at all but instead is an endless series of choices we make every nano second of our lives, both awake and in dreams. This over that, him over her, red over white, sour…
View writingA small group of us, Gwen, my oldest friend; Susan, a longtime friend; Kenji, my husband and I – were at Gwen's house, starting to make dinner. I laid some great triple brie cheese on a plate and uncorked a…
View writingWhat feels strangest is remembering what came before Those Mondays at my desk in the muck of many-user google docs & the mire of my own mind How foreign now the Sisyphean tasks, whether the color-coding of emails and trail…
View writingToday, Lydia feels like a devil in a scratchy wool skirt and white blouse. Her hair is stuck to her face, with wisps pasted to the moisture that beads her top lip and drips down the back of her neck.…
View writingIt wasn’t for lack of trying. She was simply ready to stop. No one had even told her she needed to do this; it was entirely self-imposed. The idea simply came to her one morning. *I’m going to open a…
View writingWas the trade-off “off?” Was a trade-off that was “off” even a trade? She sought memories of her childhood, her past, trying to determine if she ever “traded” one thing for another. A dull ordinary red crayon for a sharp…
View writingAna glanced back at her companions and took a deep breath. Strange trade-offs had been made, and even stranger outfits. Jeb, wore an ancient, pointed wizard's hat that seemed even older on the head of an eight-year-old boy. The brim…
View writingMack stood in the repair bay, staring at what used to be his ship. Whole chunks were missing. Chunks that, an hour ago, he would have sworn were very important parts of a working spaceship. "Whaddya think?" asked Nero. The…
View writingIntimacy is slowness. It's the unspooling of time tightly wound threads so there is only the delicate intensity of now. The forest knows how to slow down. We need the fallen trees to stop us from speeding up. We need…
View writingThe first thing Beth unpacked every year was the Tibetan Gong a friend of hers in AA had given here when she got her 30 day chip, the second time. It had a soft, resonant chime that the kids could…
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