If you’d like to read more, here are a few selected stories and essays:
“Yaiza,” fiction on The Kenyon Review Online
My friends and I were rewrapping our racquet handles with matching purple cushioned grips, the boys tossing tennis balls back and forth. When Yaiza arrived, throwing open the clubhouse door so hard that she nearly took it off its hinges, we flinched, took her in, and turned away.
“Strings,” flash fiction on The Pinch Literary Journal Online
Once, there was a husband and wife made of string. During their first years of marriage, he always picked at her threads. He ran his fingertips along her soft pointelle. He wanted to find and trace the knot of her heart and hold it in his hands.
“Stop it,” she said those first years, laughing. “That tickles.”
But as the years passed…
“Swimming Lessons,” essay in the Baltimore Review:
Your parents believed in infant swimming lessons, in pool water that cushioned you like a womb, smooth with clarity. Once a week, they held you underwater to see bubbles released from your nose, then brought you up to air, your arms and feet kicking like again you were born. Months later, you can swim like a little frog. They graduate you from the class with fanfare and baby-safe balloons.
Two years later, you remember none of it. Your parents throw a party, everyone grilling or swimming or running in the backyard. It is easy to forget you. When you fall in the pool, no one notices. In dreams you still have now, you remember drowning like this: You walk on the bottom of the pool, adults’ legs kicking in the blue in a slow ballet, mica ground into the walls glittering and pockmarked. It’s like walking on the skin of the moon. The world hovers in a deep silence. The steps, shining aquamarine with tile, waver in front of you. A net on a long pole plunges into the water, extends towards you, lifts you towards the surface. You are smiling.
“The Stones of Sorrow Lake,” published in The Georgia Review
I pressed my face to the car window to see Jackson’s hometown, the place we’d spent all our money moving to after graduation, the place we would be stuck in. It was June, the month of green. Willows everywhere wept over houses and cars and one little girl riding her bicycle. Wind from the lake fanned over waving cornfields, and when the road got close to the waterfront, the lake shone brightly over the town. Instead of sand, the shore was made of smooth stones, both large and small. Townspeople were standing at the shore—some with arms outstretched, staring into the waves, and others kneeling around with palms open, as if to catch something falling from the sky.
“That,” said Jackson, “is our lake of sorrow.”
_____
Jackson often flashed the pockmark scar on his arm, but I didn’t know what sorrow was behind it. He said he was too young to remember. The scars and the stones—they happened to nearly everyone in the town.
When the townspeople encountered their first great grief—not something small like a broken leg or a bickering between friends, but real grief, the kind that brought you to your knees—the first time they felt that, their stone of sorrow would form. Sometimes it happened when they were still children: a father who left, a great divorce, a twin who died. Sometimes it happened when they were teens. A few were lucky enough to escape it until they were older, or had somehow steeled themselves against it.
But whenever they felt that sorrow, that’s when the rock started forming—in their fists, in their praying palms, in their throats. At first it was as small as a grain of sand they couldn’t wash away, irritating. Then it would roll into a pebble over a matter of minutes or years. Sometimes it only grew as big as a skipping stone, sometimes as big as a boulder. Everyone’s sorrow took its own course and speed, and no amount of forced catharsis or letting go could make the rock go away when you wanted. In its own time the stone would dislodge, but only when it could fall on the shore of the lake. You could see the townspeople at the shore every dawn and sunset, orange light on their faces, hoping their rocks would dislodge, would lie down with their comrades of sorrow, generations of them along the waterline.
