More on: Fiction

THE MOTHER WORRIED when her Catholic son married a Hindu woman. To protect him, she sent a plastic glow-in-the-dark statue of the Madonna for his bedside table. She included a note: Our Lady, Help of Christians, will always watch over you, Baba. A dutiful son, he set up the Madonna on his nightstand. Every night…

That is actually what I thought. That a small bird had fallen from the sky and thumped my back, and when I looked at the ground I expected to see the bloody entrails of a tailorbird, but no, it was my hair, limply coiled on the dirt, already coming undone in the breeze.

He became numb as the cool metal handcuffs were slipped over his wrists for a third time. His late father would’ve told him, “Boy, I eh make stupid children. What wrong with you?”

The priest had a real hard-on for alliteration. It drove Maggie nuts.

In most of my memories of my father from childhood, he is moving.

I was only twenty, driven by a dreamy conviction that life would unfold exactly the way I wanted. Others told me I floated through the world. This they said with a mixture of pity and scorn. I didn’t know what they meant; I’m still not sure I do.

In December of 2022, adrift (again) and staying with my parents, I found among my grandmother’s papers a sealed envelope addressed to me.

How do you remember a part of your life when it freezes up on you, when it makes a living corpse of you and you walk through your days dragging your feet, scarcely noticing anything around you.

Nadine swiveled toward the oddly familiar voice, seeking a face. All she saw at first were bare feet propped on an armrest.

Apparently, thank God, they have a tour guide, swaying upright, a column of shining, jeweled scales. The guide investigates them with faceted, ravenous eyes.