Main Dishes

The first thing I saw that morning was the small folded U.S. flag on the shelf above my kitchen speaker, lit by a stripe of early Florida sun so thin it looked like a blade. Sinatra was playing low, something old and smooth, and a glass of iced tea sweated onto a paper coaster beside…

I woke up face down on kitchen tile so cold it felt borrowed from a grave. Blood had dried sticky at the corner of my mouth, and the metallic taste of it mixed with the smell of burnt coffee and scorched toast until the whole room tasted like punishment. For one stupid second I thought…

The email hit my inbox on the Monday before Thanksgiving, tucked between a client follow-up and a fraud alert from my bank, and for a full three seconds I thought I had opened somebody else’s life by mistake. Not because my sister Araminta never sent emails. She did, constantly—sunrise mantras, links to retreats in Santa…

The first thing I noticed that morning was the little folded U.S. flag tucked on the shelf by the patio door, left over from the Fourth of July and still standing as if optimism could be stored like decoration. Sunlight poured through the glass and laid itself over my backyard in warm gold, touching the…

The morning sky over Austin carried that bruised gray color that seems to press its whole weight onto your shoulders before you have even stepped out of the car. The Travis County courthouse stood ahead of me in old stone and shadow, stern and square against the low March clouds, its columns holding up the…

The first thing I noticed before I hit the floor was the tiny American flag magnet clipped to the metal edge of my cubicle wall, the kind somebody in accounting handed out every Fourth of July and nobody bothered to throw away. It trembled when I grabbed my desk, rattling beside a shipment calendar, a…