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Come Away to a Lonely Place
Two weeks ago I put on the moss agate ring my great-grandmother won selling magazines in the red dirt of her Oklahoma girlhood. I still wear a wedding band and it keeps the moss agate’s roomy rose-gold band from slipping off my finger. But the wedding band can’t keep the moss agate steady and the stone spins around, a milky rock whose green threading curls like a fishing net falling through water. If you have seen me this week, it is likely you have glimpsed me at the helm of my grandparents’ gold Cadillac, floating through my hometown at high speeds, windows down, music blaring, the moss agate ring glinting white and blank from my left hand....
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Death and All His Friends
Summer is a time of family pilgrimages less fraught than their holiday counterparts, but sometimes just as freighted. I could bore you with a list of all the calamities that sent me home this past summer—heartbreaks, crises, etc.—but I won’t. I’ll just tell you that I went home and that my going home coincided with death. I’ve missed so many deaths, living away from a hometown where my family has a history of generations and where, until I lit out a decade ago, our life together was relatively untouched by transience....
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Last Night I Was Thinking of You
It is last night, many nights and years ago, a night when I drank a glass of wine and then I cut my hair. The wine I drank from the fat bulb of a fine crystal wine glass—the finest glass we owned, one of a wedding gift pair, against which all cheap plates and plastics looked pale and unreal. I held the glass in one hand as I lay reading in the white-washed cave of our basement apartment, stroking the glass with a finger: seeing the clear moisture wick down when the wine swirled and settled, seeing the print of my lips—no color, only skin—feathered on the rim. “Do you remember,” I asked my husband, but as I spoke I remembered....
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Brownies of Love
A bar of chocolate melts slowly from its heart, the smooth squares sinking until it pools in the saucepan and the whole kitchen is perfumed with coffee, earth, and the strange pheromone of cacao. As a child, I never watched a bar of chocolate melt because my mom made brownies only with cocoa powder. Cocoa powder does not melt; it congeals on perspiring hunks of Crisco, which melt in clear, viscous, cocoa-peppered pools, stubbornly separate from the chocolate until the whole mess is stirred together. Then, at last....
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Maplewood Barn
On our way to the Missouri River road last week, my mom and I spurred off down a hometown byroad, to the gravel parking lot of an old manse turned city park. I had not been there since I was fifteen. We were on our way to my cousin’s wedding and we could not stop; we only pulled the car around in a slow, wide circle, allowing me to see that everything was as I remembered it....
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Current Issue
Issue 72
Memoir by Lauren Winner, Poetry by James Harpur, Art by Guy Chase and Adrian Wiszniewski
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