I remember squatting beside the white picket fence in my front yard, skinny sprigs of grass tickling my bare legs, accepting in warm release the fact that I would never make it to the front door, through the living and dining rooms, through the narrow kitchen and hallway to the yellow bathroom.

I remember the peeling yellow paint, picking out shapes when I was bored, my favorite image the cheerful Peanuts bird, Woodstock.

I remember the…

I've always sympathized with Katie Holmes; she was a "mini" in Hollywood and here came this mega-movie star who swept her off her feet and into the weird of Scientology and male domination. 

She was high on his fumes and out of her mind, long enough to sleepwalk into pregnancy, but that silent birth bit must have been a scary peek into her future; I remember it well. 

Things were probably never the same after the baby, but she hoped she was wrong, hoped Tom…

My healthcare package was quite decent while I was an employee of St. John Hospital, a Catholic Sisters of Charity hospital; it included coverage for birth control pills, though I didn't need them since...SSSsssshhhhhh... my tubes were tied.

Which brings up a few good questions:  Should Catholic hospitals, universities and charities employ women who've had tubal ligations, men who use condoms, men who have vasectomies or any non-Catholic or Catholic who participates…

Poor Chester's toe was amputated because the bone kept swelling and he couldn't walk on it, then the vet said it might be cancer but that he "got it all", which is just one of those things we hope is enough, hope being lighter than faith but of equal value.

I donated  blood for a thirty-seven year old father of two because he has cancer, and it was good to see so many lined up for a man few of us knew, then I felt woozy as my pint of crimson O slowly…

They believed she was dead.

Once the dirt was flattened with backs of shovels, the men walked home to their wives, showered the dead woman from their skin.

She was just a whore, the secondary sex, the seed of Eve and the fall.  So they buried her.

In their nightmares the men saw black tree skeletons clawing up out of the ground, outer limbs like hands, the whispers of deep rattling voices from below growing louder, "What you…

Her writing is still not her best, but it's better since she fell out of love with herself and others.  

Once she smelled her own shit and death snuggled up, there was fire.

When she got mad, sick, tired, bored, she got better.

Like grit in an oyster or green rising from ash.

As the walls closed in she looked for ways out, learned from wrong approaches the way out of hell -- through…

It's eighty degrees, blue sky visible through the sunroof, similar to a day in 1996 when I woke up thirty pounds heavier with hair cut and dyed awful, me drunk and flying in a candy red Jeep Wrangler.

I was new to AOL and come-ons like I'm typing with one hand, especially between women.

She was blond and wanted to meet, so I suggested Seabrook's famous pink Maribelle's near Galveston Bay where a few beers, brine and white gulls could swell a blank…

I found him looking at the moon from his bedroom window last year - he'd just turned four - and though it was difficult at first to make out the song, I understood, "If you wish upon a star..." 

For Christmas we gave him an iPad but didn't have to teach him to use it, a common autism plus.  He mastered the matching game after the first run and changed the difficulty setting from "Easy" to "Hard".  A week later he changed the language from English to French,  from "turtle" to…

She did research for three years, posed as a fiction writer on a social writing network. 

She wrote flash fiction and dark humor, made friends with an impressive number of members.  She chose the most interesting people on the site, entertaining eccentrics, outrageously talented, and she won their trust through weekly personal emails. 

She'd promised her boss at Mind Magazine that she would have one hell of a story, but she never expected this -- the…

I fell in love on a Sunday afternoon, maybe sooner when he opened his mouth with something daring, funny and brilliant, but the truth only caught in my throat after we said goodbye, when Resurrection Fern played on the radio for the first time. 

Maybe our souls were tapping out Morse code for centuries until finally, there we were, for one solid beat.

It was unsettling to meet the key that fits my…

No human encounter is routine:

The Dance Costume Clerk:  This fifty-something Italian divorce'e immediately launches into the story of her marriage ending despite how Catholic they were, how her third-born son's marriage also ended when the young wife decided to "go find" herself, that it's unbearable since her beloved granddaughter was moved three states away and it's hard not to interfere in your kids' lives, which gives me an opening to recommend Anne…

1991:  The first is an ex-boyfriend thirteen years my senior who kept a photo album of conquest polaroids, who once attended a sexual/spiritual retreat employing bizarre rituals supposedly practiced by the Chiloquin Kenosha Indians, rituals which involved lying naked on the floor and chanting in a candlelit room scented with patchouli and sweat, arms and legs splayed like wings.

1981:  There was my stepfather's nephew, Aiden, frantically flown here from Miami on a red-eye,…

An older woman and twenty-something girl are sitting in an idling white Lexus beside my car.  From their rearview mirror hangs a wooden crucifix and a small red plastic tractor. 

The tan upholstery is stained dark gray where limbs frequently rest and rub, a big hole chewed into the driver's door exposing a ragged butterscotch foam. 

There is a chaotic stack of mail on the driver's dash which the older woman sorts through while the younger passenger tears…

The house at 2839 Bratton Street was difficult to recognize when we drove by yesterday, the trees so much taller, the bricks warmer from an interior somehow more occupied.

It was the first house we lived in when we moved to SugarLand in July of 2003, one month before we married, a house rented from an attractive Chinese woman who thanked us profusely for taking care of it, though later she would keep most of our deposit to pay landscapers to tend her…

Both my kids got ribbons for riding horses on Friday, the end of a joyful ninety-five degree week on the backs of "Shorty" and "Ginger", days of dirt and manure on boots, sweaty hair and priceless smiles.

My dad's recent letter said he'd love for us to come for a visit, me and the kids, but I haven't seen him since 1998, our dance awkward even then, and I'm trying to both imagine and assess the value of bridging such a compounded gap.

I just received Jonah…

Some believe the answer gathered on a stone that fell from the world.

They believe the answer was the atomic number of love, the face of creation painted on a rice grain, the perfect song swallowed by a rare bird.

Hope still lingers, gray clouds of incense sealed in red rooms, perfumed whores on antique couches, long-nailed hands shuffling Tarot cards.

Tired hope stares ahead, old eyes searching tea leaves in cracked porcelain cups, the…

"Answered prayers cause more tears than those that remain unanswered."  Saint Teresa of Avila

Despite having a hideous name like Truman Streckfus Persons, born to parents called Lillie Mae and Carchulus, he could have had it all.

His mother later remarried, renamed her son Truman Garcia Capote, and I wonder if the name changed him, if he'd have been worse off with Persons, like Bill Clinton might have been as Bill Blythe or that…

                                 Toby Tucker Hecht!

Toby collects overheard gems in a notebook -- fabulous stuff!  Here's a repeat of her post:

1.…

What do you need to be told, honey?  That you're handsome or beautiful, funny, smart, successful, strong, powerful, superior, rare?

I want to whisper to your needs, to believe my words, for as long as it takes whispers to burn, to drift in quiet ash and cling to our oils in powdery dark smears.

I can not say I love you, though for a minute I do, for the minute we are one and hungry for lies. 

I want to make love to you, to call it…

I've been falling in love in dreams lately, with types I wouldn't choose in daylight; there was Baretta's Robert Blake, Simon Baker from The Devil Wears Prada, then the slight but sexy Ewan McGreger from Moulin Rouge.  

There's an unmade bed in every dream.

Last night the lover was saavy Simon, multilingual, eyes like fingers.  He moved with snakes in his hips, glasses of red wine in each hand.  While drunk on our secrets he smiled a…