By seventh grade students often work with percentages, fractions, probability and proportional relationships. Math looks different at our Long Covid house. We practice for survival, not standardized testing. What percentage of a medication is metabolized by the liver? By the kidneys? What fraction of the pediatric population gets well?
(nonfiction)
The way I’d savor, lovesick, a stricken voice preserved on tape as if in amber. The way I banked those messages. Playing them over and again as proof that once, I had made him care. Echo of skin and moisture and shine and shame. Power diminishing with repetition.
(nonfiction)
You cleaned buckwheat in Ukraine and you’ll continue in America. You even brought a sack of groats with you. Were you afraid you’d starve in this great capitalist country?
(nonfiction/Ukraine)
There was another reason why I opted not to become a doctor like my daddy. He was the only pediatric urologist in town, so he left for work before I woke, shuttled between two hospitals throughout the day, and returned home after my bedtime. Unbeknownst to me, when he would come to give me a goodnight kiss while I was fast asleep, I’d stick out my tongue at him.
(nonfiction)
At 4 a.m. I am awakened by a vision of the river goddess. I am told without words that she saved baachan from drowning. After the funeral of my great-baachan. After a mokugyo drum was broken through. After a shaman sprinkled gold dust into the house’s fire.
(nonfiction)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
After descending into the basement, you act as if you never went, as if you have no idea what the basement really is or what happened there. Even though you left the girl you once were in the basement, you spent the rest of your nights pretending it didn’t happen.
(fiction)
The holes breathed damp breath that wasn’t quite alive but wasn’t dead either. It takes little to make beauty out of wreckage, wreckage out of beauty. Winter sun gleams in the spray, constellates in the ice. A Buick skids from the road and tumbles across a bare field.
(nonfiction)
Discovering Tarkovsky upended my attempt to build a coherent, if radically reduced, worldview post-Iraq. Ten years after leaving the military I found myself replaying certain scenes from his Solaris and Stalker well into the early morning hours, with no thought to plot, or social relevance, just the sound and absence and the want and the curious, sacred fullness that followed these unanchored gaps in experience.
(nonfiction)
You hang out on top of the three ancient towels you’ve layered on your couch and know you’ve done the automated surveys, and they improve nothing. You and your doctor have pushed pre-authorization – nothing. You’ve talked to your HR managers and you’ve written to the state’s insurance commissioner, and this has done nothing.
(nonfiction)
When I traveled to Geneva, no matter what else was on the agenda, a reservation at the Boeuf Rouge was required. I never changed my order from quenelle de brochet. I looked forward to the quenelles more than any other part of my visit; they were a reliable, savory anchor in my itinerant young life.
(nonfiction)
