Writing Samples
From Something Like Strings
The girl lived in a town of 2,400 with a green and gazebo, a white church, and a small stone school, preserved as if out of a storybook. As if entitled New England Quaintness. Each summer there was a parade and a carnival where she got to dunk a schoolteacher into water again and again. Sometimes she walked down the hill and across the street, played in the foundations of half-built homes, wandered through the milkweed in search of caterpillars. The girl caught a butterfly in her palm, and it did not fly away. She could be still.
Later, her father said, “Hold out your hand.” He pinched each one of her fingertips, crinkling the skin into an X, and then did the same to the middle of her palm, right on the life line, on the place where the butterfly had rested. He slowly raised his hand from hers, as if gathering up her fingers. She felt the pull of the imaginary strings binding them together, how his hand connected to hers in the ether. How it would always connect.
From “Presence”
My family’s house is steeped in history. My bedroom was first claimed by my uncle Dick, my canopy bed by my aunt Beguine. The spray paint in the cellar: the work of my uncle Jonathan. The back porch: that of my father and his father. Lying in bed at night, I would feel their ghostlike presence. I’d look out the blackness of my small window and imagine someone out there, looking in. And sometimes out of the corner of my eye I’d see it, a wisp, a streaky cloud of movement, and think there they are.
Logic says it was just the reflection of my mom or dad or brother opening the door to the bathroom across the hall. But perhaps, many years ago, my uncle climbed out that window. Time caught his motion–as the dark catches a bright strobe–and played it before my eyes.
