After her wife dies (cancer, brain, sudden), she watches lectures her wife recorded for her students, videos she’d never seen while Pam was alive. They’re about Romantic poetry—Coleridge, Shelley, et al.—and the university at which her wife had been an…
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They’re called mandibular tori, and yes, since you’re asking, they do hurt, a little, often, not in a take-me-to-the-dentist-immediately way but in an ongoing, low-grade, what-can-you-do-but-learn-to-live-with-it kind of way. They occur in 5-7% of the population, which means I am…
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The autumn I turn ten, we leave my dad and the crusted expanse of Arizona desert, hard-packed sand dotted with dried grass and shriveled cacti, for the suburbs of Chicago. I’m crammed in the middle of the backseat with my…
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I envied the pigs their voice. They weren’t silenced. Well, not before the electrocution or before the Hog Sticker with his 18-inch blade sliced the swine’s throats as they hung upside down. All the better for the bleed out. I…
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1. Aeropuerto Internacional de la Ciudad de México I’m in a line, a line of lines, waiting to check in for my flight to Monterrey. The line isn’t moving. I’m watching a man maneuver a floor machine in and around…
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