Essays – Page 2 – swamp pink

What Comes Next

February 27, 2023

My first job is at a desert of a store, tucked in the West Texas Panhandle, next to the Bible Mart and across from the Zales. At just the right angle from inside the store, the city waterpark peeks out from behind the glossy wedding band shop, all faded-blue loopy slides from the seventies and...

A Man Can Die But Once

February 6, 2023

A fortune teller told my grandfather he would die at age seventy, so he spent the better part of that inauspicious year in bed, covers pulled over his head, waiting. I heard this story in bits and pieces from my mother, thirty-five years later, as she lay in her own bed close to death. According...

Bahjí

November 14, 2022

For Melissa Stephenson & for Lee Alisha Williams My father is buried by the ducks. Follow their sound, dear readers. My father used to take us to this cemetery in Augusta, Georgia, to visit the grave site of Dr. Zíá Bagdádí, a well-known Bahá’í. Now, my father himself is buried there. After his funeral, my...

Ghosts

October 3, 2022

While my two older sisters were huddled inside a heavily curtained bedroom, channeling spirits and calling on ghosts, I was outdoors in the sunlight amongst the rocks and thistles searching for horses. I was seven and seeking a glimpse of the famed silver brumby, Thowra. It was school holidays and we were at my grandparent’s...

A More Complete Truth

I I can see my grandfather most clearly in the hours before his death, though I was hundreds of miles away. He had been dying for a while—it was slow and nonspecific, his heart beating less often and with less force. My obaasan had taken him to the doctor, who confirmed yes, you’re dying. You’ll...

The Death Drive

Last October, I began to rent space in an art studio in Harwood, a neighborhood in Northwest Baltimore just a few blocks from where I live. I am standing in it now, watching clay dry on a plaster slab my partner and I built for recycling clay refuse. Its big west-facing windows overlook a community...

Two Aliens

November 23, 2021

There’s this thing that I do every week which is to work at the front desk of the yoga studio by my house and check people in for class. I don’t get paid to do it, but I only have to be there for three hours and in exchange, I get to take as many...

Hole(s)

November 18, 2021

Everyone who has seen, sees farther. —Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée I remember neither being terrified nor anticipating the hole the night I fell into it. Light had gone out inside the stuffy 4×4 shed that was the outhouse, where heat rose from weeks-old putrefaction, an underworld full of as-yet-unknown knowledge to my five-year-old self....

Reasons to Live

I went to Bratislava because I was tired of being owned by other people, of being violated by them. There was the man on a Thai island, who’d waited until the porchlight switched off outside my bungalow before stepping out of the shadows. There was the boy who’d helped himself to my body when we...

On Discerning An Impossible Object

The first friend I ever made at school was a boy named Gordon. He wore jeans and flannels, and his cheeks were round and always red. We got along well, and one day I suggested that we hang out after school some time. He agreed and said that he liked that idea, adding that if...

The Super's Wife

December 3, 2020

A few days after the new year, my husband Mark tells me he’s worried about Harry. Mark has described Harry as fiftyish, judging by the worry grooves in his forehead and the gray growing on the sides of his long wavy hair. He’s the only one—out of three-hundred apartments—who has never once voiced a complaint....

Algebra

In the right-hand corner of the classroom, in front of Richard Adams who sits in front of Annette Aldous who sits in front of Lisa Bingham who sits in front of Evan Chapman who sits in front of Steven Durham who sits in front of Lena Ellis, the girl leans her head against a brick...