She sits on the spring grass, next to her son. Looking about at the trees, the wind tugging at the leaves, the broad swath of dappled sunlight streaming into the broken shade around her, she wonders if he likes this place. She thinks about his first steps, the proud surprised smile on his face, his chubby fists held out for balance as he walks across the living room floor into her waiting arms. And later, his first day of school, his first bicycle ride, the first date, driving a car, college… Continue

In the courtroom, his lawyer argued that he was drunk when it happened. But the truth was that the cactus closest to the house had been bothering him all day, the way it leaned, the way it had simply given up, its two heaviest branches tipping it down into the dirt, defeated. Just before bed, he went to the drawer in the kitchen where they stored the knives and pulled out the two sharpest, one to impale the branch and the other to hack it off, and he went outside and set the thing right.… Continue

Albert Einstein woke in the middle of the night from a dream of dogs ripping at his legs. He sat up in his little bed, the photons of a gibbous moon streaming in through the slats of the half-open blinds and shivered, rubbing his legs. He missed his wife. He looked about the room, stared at the fading picture of Roosevelt, his Nobel Peace Prize on the dresser, the photographs of his lost sons, and thought about the children of Hiroshima, what went through their minds in the final milliseconds… Continue

Building 1 is Obstetrics, Building 2 Emergency, Building 3 Administration, Building 4 Oncology and Geriatrics. The quartet of buildings serves the full circle, from birth to shit happens to endless bill-paying to death. I wander the halls, waiting, my eyes held rigidly forward, attempting to avoid the unavoidable glimpses of pale needful flesh lying all around me. The gowns flapping, the mops reeking of ammonia swishing back and forth, back and forth, the machinery beep, beep, beeping, assuring… Continue