FIVE At four p.m., a month after Mom died, Aunt Peggy first came to my doorstep with her black bag. She held her hand out to me and said, “Hello Maggie, I’m your Aunt Peggy.” I was five. “What’s in the bag, Aunt Peggy?” I reached out a hand to…

The Pyrenees Mountains, 1907 There was a movement outside the window at the end of the hallway, a flutter of shadow in the darkness beyond.  Maudine stopped and waited, alert. She had already extinguished all the torches in the long stone corridor but the moonlight was bright. It bounced from…

October 4, 1970Tishomingo, Oklahoma Tammy lingered over a cigarette rimmed red with someone else’s lipstick. She exhaled, the wisp of stolen smoke rising to join the music that seeped from the diner’s radio. She stubbed out the burning ember, and as the last spark spiraled heavenward, she closed her eyes…

June 10th, 1998 I hold up the pair of skeleton keys, clipped together with a golden seven keychain. Mother’s only forty-eight but the cancer makes her seem older. “You’ll need those to contact him.”  She means my father. A man I’ve met twice. A man who blamed his life long…

Dallas is waiting for a train. She is slumped on a smooth marble bench, knees drawn up to her chest, arms wrapped around them, chest heavy with the occasional shuddering breath. She looks out over the water, clear blue reflecting the sparkling sun and perfect fluffy clouds. It is like…

Airports have always terrified me. It may seem foolish that something as innocuous as an airport could instill such fear in a person, but the idea of them positively disturbs me. That tentative, in-between place where people last touched ground, soon to board a gravity-defying, cylindrical enclosed tube, about to…

I moved to the Jeonpo area of Busan not long after my wife died. She was hit by a car on her way to work one morning and, as she was the main provider in our relationship and the one who paid the rent, I couldn’t afford to stay in…

“Go on Ed, go see if he’s there.” My mother shooed me out onto the street many times to check on my dad. By the time I was eight years old, I could find my way to Jake’s Place without even looking. Three steps to the sidewalk, turn left, and…