We are at Cape Coast Castle, and Callie refuses to be held. She won’t let me carry her in my arms. She won’t let me put her in the cloth carrier on my back. She won’t ride on her father’s shoulders. She won’t sit astride my hip. She wants...
Lou Marie, my grandmother, is telling this story. It is a story about before, before she was old, before she became the drawl, the accent, the presence behind the white door in her own daughter’s house, with only her hair to keep her from...
Like other children, I was fascinated by old Lucifer, by his horns and tail, which simultaneously made him sinister and gave him an animal’s grace, by his fire-engine hide, his flame that no fire engine can put out, and above all by his...
My father was never one to complain. On the morning of the day he died, an ulcer he’d suffered from for years, and left untreated, ruptured and began to bleed. Two days later I met with the town coroner. He told me the end had been painless...
As soon as I began to ask questions, I realized how much work had gone into no longer asking them, into silences or re-routings, into omissions, not-noticings—into a carefully pruned rhetoric of absence. When I began to realize I wanted...
Not long after I fell in love with my wife, I fell in love with her father. I can’t say for sure if I loved him until after she and I were married, but I liked him from that very first night.