Issue 14, 2026

A hot day in July 1973. A bored teenage girl. A motel on the beach. Birds. All of this is a memory, of sorts. But also, not a memory. Rather, it is a construction of memories, a patchwork of visual images, stitched to the stories my sister and I have told for half a century. 

Here he is, a little boy with curly brown hair, dressed all in white. He must be about two and a half years old. A darling boy, looking at the camera. Someone has taken a sharp-pointed object—a nail?—and stabbed the photo again and again. It is pierced with small holes. Who did this? When did they do it? What was going on?

My baptism is more than a mere whisper of water sprinkled on my forehead; it is an immersion, the dunking of my whole body in a tank of cool water situated under a stained-glass empty cross.

. . . because I was so busy, and sad and overwhelmed, I usually tried to buffalo her into compliance. But she was not one to be bullied, and she would routinely resist with loud defiance and tears.

 

It feels like only yesterday I was busy mother–henning the boy. I ran around clucking and fussing and tried my damnedest to keep him safe and sound. Naively, I thought if I made him a soft nest it might make up for everything that had landed him under our roof. 

They disappear into the house. I back my car out the driveway. It feels correct that he chooses him over me—he looked more rugged, more masculine—qualities I assume make him more universally attractive than me. As I set my car into drive, I look one last time at the house, as the man in charge closes the door and shuts me out. 

New Year’s Day in Tulsa, just past noon, you stand shivering before a mural of your hero’s hero, Woody Guthrie, his guitar emblazoned with the slogan “This Machine Kills Fascists.” Plastered over his head: “This Land Is Your Land.” You wonder, whose land?  

Two weeks ago, you spat in a tube and sent it through the mail. Today, an email tells you to download the app to get your DNA analysis results. The results? Mexico. You expected that since both maternal and paternal grandparents left Jalisco for Colton, California, more than 100 years ago. 

When the doorbell rang, I confronted my father-in-law, my first mother-in-law, and my third mother-in-law. They were stacked haphazardly beside the door in three boxes with sinister “Cremated Remains” stickers affixed to them

I wondered: Would I? I didn’t make yearly visits to the cemetery, as my parents had. I no longer had a mother to demand that I uphold this tradition. Why not just let it slide?

This sorrow I’ve carried for 30 years belongs to someone else, but I can’t ever give it back. I wouldn’t if I could because it weighs (M ☉) or 2×1030kg which, I got far enough in that astronomy class to learn, is the approximate weight of the sun. 

The end of my baseball career snuck up on me like a late afternoon shadow; my last at-bat tucked beneath the blanket of cold April air that covered Pocatello’s Bill Derham Field. My breath streamed silver as I dug in and twirled my bat, the smell of pine tar and clay rich in my nostrils.

I sat by the window on the ride home, my stomach cramping as the bus bumped along, the pad foreign between my legs. I couldn’t believe how things could change, then change back again. At least I could stop sneaking down to the basement to throw up. I traced hearts on the fogged window, wiping them away before Gordon could see. 

Each day, I pass a single mallard duck. . . .She looks pensive, seems acutely aware of her surroundings by the small leafy pond that she seems to watch over. I kneel down toward the water’s edge, and when I say Hola Pata, she looks toward me as though she understands. 

Home ownership is indubitably part and parcel of the American Dream. . . : it is tethered to the opportunity for individual prosperity, reified through maniacal lawn care, a major kitchen remodel, the addition of a back deck or swimming pool. 

I don’t remember exactly when I began planning my nervous breakdown. It was perhaps seven years after I first arrived in the United States with a two-month-old passport, $200 in cash, and $800 in debt to the brother who bought my plane ticket. 

Sage stood out early on.

She was bold.

She was the first to explore on her own