Animals come after my father dies. Dogs. Cats. Ducks. Geese. A goat. A peacock. They wander to our home several years into his absence, appearing on our doorstep, or catching our eye from feed store cages. Always, we take them in. We line our laundry room floor with bath towels, bed sheets and spare blankets, filling cereal bowls with tap water, and mending cut skin, matted fur, and broken feathers. Then we flick off the light to watch them sleep.

Strays make the best pets, my mother tells us kids. They won’t leave. [Read more →]

Susan was writing a story about a teacher who almost lost everything when she had an affair with a married man, the father of one of her students, and Susan’s best friend Frannie, a sixth-grade teacher, was sure the story was about her.

“Oh my god, Susie,” Frannie moaned. “How could you do this to me?”

In Susan’s story, the teacher rendezvoused with her lover at the beach during summer vacation. They made love in her dank motel room while his family slept peacefully in their cottage down the road. Frannie had just returned from a weekend at the beach with her married lover. There was a healthy pink blush across her cheekbones and a crop of freckles on her shoulders and down her slender arms. [Read more →]

(This piece also appeared in the Mount Voices Journal published in April 2008 by Mount St. Mary’s College in Los Angeles.)

Somehow I’d connected wearing a bra with a story on television about a young girl with polio in an iron lung. Her hair, head and neck were all that could be seen of the body inside the machine that breathed for her in place of her paralyzed diaphragm. She talked softly, looking up into a mirror placed above her face, but she couldn’t move. If she didn’t recover from the polio, she’d have to stay in the iron lung forever in order to breathe. My mind made an illogical connection. I thought that wearing a bra might be as constrictive as trying to breathe in an iron lung. [Read more →]

The bed is as difficult to sleep in as the house is to come home to. The silence isn’t the problem. She’s used to that. It’s the thought that no one will join her. The thought slams, hard, when she tries to find a comfortable position in the bed. Alone.

As she stands by the rumpled comforter, the sheets she’s just tossed off, Margo’s hand shakes. She’s waited until after Christmas to do this. For a week, she’s worn a pad in anticipation of the sudden rush of red that would soak her if she didn’t keep checking each time she used the bathroom. Nothing. No red. She won’t see it now. The pregnancy testing stick she is holding has a plus sign on it. [Read more →]

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It was nine o’clock when Chuy Sandoval called home. After a long day, Chuy had a few drinks at Rico’s and thought better of driving. He was far too tired to walk. His wife teased him a little, then rattled down there in her old station wagon and picked him up.

“I’m glad you called me,” Teresa said. “It’s good you didn’t drive.”

“I couldn’t drive if you paid me,” Chuy said. [Read more →]