Selected Writing
Sea Wall
Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices
Poor Theo, everyone always says. But there I was in my wetsuit, wading knee deep in the frigid ocean, blindly feeling around to retrieve cut-up pieces of my limited-edition world map that had hung on our living room wall before my brother destroyed it. I must have looked like a madwoman, holding up laminated fragments of oceans and countries to examine under the cold pink light of the winter sunset, before dropping them in a clamming bucket.
What the Children Left Behind
Psychopomp
The children gathered by the shore at midnight in a quiet row along the high-tide mark, a crooked picket fence with heads of varying heights. They wore ripped and mud-splattered clothes, dug up from their parents’ attics: proof that they used to run free beyond their ecto-green lawns, sheared with such precision so as to create one continuous landscape.
Miles and Music
Contrary
My grandfather dies on the stairs, no doubt dressed from hat to socks in maroon and gold. He is ready for the game, ready to chant “For Boston” on behalf of the Boston College Eagles, but his heart has other plans. It lurches and works overtime, until it is done, his 50-year-old heart. The shock of it leaves no time for reflection. My father gets on a plane, reversing course just months after driving 1,200 miles from home, passing under St. Louis’s Gateway Arch, to begin life as a medical student.
