Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

One of my favorite stories is about an old woman and her husband—a man mean as Mondays, who scared her with the violence of his temper and the shifting nature of his whims.

You never live with a woman, you live inside of her, I overheard my father say to my brother once, and it was, indeed, as if, when peering into the mirror, you were blinking out through her thickly fringed eyes.

So my joints feel like the fat rubber bands used to bind broccoli, and my face is lined where I’d stupidly slept sleep-pressed against the seams of the quilt’s patchwork.

We were in love, and I dreamt of our future. The home in the middle of the Indiana woods. An old chapel that once housed a cloister of nuns, nuns who prayed with their shoulders pressed against each other, and who took vows and called each other Sister. A stone exterior, dried mortar pinched and oozing. Narrow paths winding through old gardens, a n

As a grown woman, I would have said to my father that there are true things in this world observed only by a single set of eyes.

Then the hazy buzz of summer saunters in, and the air screeches and hums. Cicada-killing wasps catch the weakest and stab them motionless, hauling the weight of their bodies and their glass wings up and up and somewhere else. Fireflies drunkenly dazzle the dark. The leaves are full, dark green, the trees dense and folded in on themselves, catching