On a scale of one to ten, Taylor Hoffman’s confidence bounced between 7.5 and 9. He knew his little sister was going to die, had known it for some time, hadn’t said those words to anyone ever, and didn’t intend to. A solid student, he lived off-campus with two other guys and worked two afternoons […]
Lauren walked around the bed, took her chair, flopped an arm on her daughter’s bed and leaned toward her. “I thought your dad was a jock, okay? For whatever reason. He was on a scholarship and I just assumed it was a baseball scholarship. He had that kind of look, that’s what I thought right […]
The poetry reading had been going well. This annual Philly event drew a sizable crowd, but this year—for unexplained reasons—the hall was jammed. Crammed in the third row, at the break I stood to stretch and look around. McQuitty, one of our greatest local poets, was sitting at the end of the last row. I […]
both how wrong the aloneness of my Father’s body, slumped in the reverberant too-small bath. and Mother, cupping His head, mapped with violent-violet scans, explorations of hope, reduced, a crown of purple thorns, a porcelain throne, draped in linen terrycloth. damn God! he’s unskinned, out of his shell of Fatherness, adrift, washed into the sea, […]