It had been a long time since I heard the owls cry in the night. Last night in bed I counted three in the distance, a hoot-hoot with a menacing tone. It reminded me of waking in Marrakech to the… Read More ›
Creative Nonfiction
After blackberry picking
I remember the day Lily and I came home from our road trip. We’d left Utah on a Sunday morning and reached Seattle by lunchtime on Tuesday. Hadn’t driven more than six hours a day, surprised by how quickly it… Read More ›
Bookending
You could see where the landscape fabric was poking through the bark I put down in the beds and that rankled me. I hated seeing the irregularities, the underlying scheme. I could get really anal retentive like that. We noticed… Read More ›
Sand tray therapy
It is here I feel most at home. Oil City. The worst name for the best place. No oil, no city: a developer’s name, a get-rich scheme. There is no imagination in the name only nature here, no boundaries or… Read More ›
Work ID
I went back to work. In the last year I’d only worked nine weeks, two short contracts. Now I had a contract through the end of June, 2024 with the possibility to extend by another six months. The certainty felt… Read More ›
There’s nothing soft about softball
My whole body hurt. Softball made me do things I normally wouldn’t do, like sprint. Or leap. I even stretched for as long as I could. Swung the bat, rolled my shoulders out. Still I was stiff for days. I… Read More ›
Giving it up
Flipping through the photos on my phone it’s upsetting to see all these pictures of me drinking. Why I felt the need to photograph myself doing that, and how stupid I look. It’s kind of funny to see myself like… Read More ›
100% remote
Softly the leaves on the burning bush began to turn. In my mind I pictured it going red then dropping like confetti, like broken glass. No car alarms or sirens in the suburbs, just the sound of our lawn sprinkler… Read More ›
Sense memory
I hadn’t eaten meat or lifted weights in a year and then I started doing both again the same day. It was the Fourth of July and the smoked pork shoulder triggered me. Not the taste or the garishness of… Read More ›
Saved by old times
I drove Lily to a job interview but it didn’t go well and I don’t think she got it. We printed her resume but it came out looking funny, the color cartridges blurred the subtitles. I felt for her, that… Read More ›
Bill Pearse 