I worked a couple hours in the yard cleaning up branches and breaking down limbs clipping, sweeping, yanking out roots and pruning, stuff we probably should have done in the fall—then just got in the car and drove out to… Read More ›
Creative Nonfiction
The Sponge Factory diaries (Philadelphia, ’95)
Perhaps Philadelphia got its edge from the fact that the mayor ordered the bombing of a house in a residential area in 1985, a house with children and potential convicts inside — or perhaps it was like a jealous younger… Read More ›
More posts about baths, please
How impossibly dark it gets here in the afternoons sometimes. I lay in the bath with the pork roast brining and thought about the father-daughter Valentine’s dance at the community center, the one coming up that Charlotte seems so excited… Read More ›
A message for a Golem one morning
Clouds spun out in pillowy strands, like cotton candy. The frozen leaves on the rhododendrons collapsed in on themselves like umbrellas. They had a copy of The Corrections in the lending library on the dead end street so I nabbed… Read More ›
Ballad for a dying bird one Sunday
I cradled the near-dead bird in my palm, it was the size of a chicken egg and felt warm, I could feel it breathing, though it had its eyes closed like it was wincing, fanning the air with its feet,… Read More ›
The day we thought we died
It was the first time I started my morning ritual but then stopped and just went back to bed. I got the coffee going, fed the animals, but it was still dark outside so I lay in bed another 20… Read More ›
Meditation on a nameless day
Climbing mountains you get high enough you can see above the cloud deck, the tips of the other peaks coming through, how the clouds look like soup from above, and in every direction just the land stretching out, no cities—like… Read More ›
Sterling Hotel snapshot, 1992
I sat at the end of the bar with the bartender Robbie watching It’s A Wonderful Life, his favorite movie. It was snowing outside and the bar was basically closed. He wasn’t supposed to, but Robbie only charged me for… Read More ›
First night with the lights
The hail fell, a proxy for the snow, but the cold made the windows fogged around the edges like it was matted, and it took me back to that house in Bethlehem where we lived, that night it kept snowing… Read More ›
Don’t blame Belfast, ’16
It was in Belfast this time of year we learned Charlotte can sleepwalk. It’s not like a special power sleepwalking, more a defect. The house was really small with steep stairs and I had the coal stove going all night… Read More ›
Bill Pearse 