Category: Our Words, Our Lives
-
The Craters of Our Lives
Our couch came with craters installed underneath each cushion. Sit on it, and your rump plummets. The cushion caves in. You sink, your knees are as high as your forehead. You have to peer around them to watch TV. I pile three pillows together to sit. And still I sink. Lesson: don’t buy cheap-ass furniture.…
-
The Things They Tell You Not to Write About
Our morning begins with the clack of the walker’s brakes a wall away from where I sit here writing—that specific clunk of two handles lifted to release the wheels. But for her, it began an hour ago, waking up, looking at the ceiling of her bedroom, deciding whether or not to rise. It’s a painful…
-
Why Live? Good Question
It’s the end of the semester at my university, and I see near-horror on every single one of my students’ faces. Haggard, stressed, they walk the halls with a vacuous look, with nine essays and five exams whipping their minds into near-submission. Every fiber of their existence is as taut as a bow string; and…
-
My Guns, Part 2: My Blackbirds
I was both a city and country mouse, living between my father’s deep-Appalachian world of sharecroppers, hunters, and, yes, moonshine, and the bustling metropolis of Rogersville, Tennessee, population around 5,100. I grew up in a small, middle-class suburb on the edge of town, a place where people kept their grass cut and their children played…
-
My Guns, Part 1
I don’t remember Dad handing me my first rifle. I do remember killing my first rabbit. It was winter, I’d just turned nine, so, in Appalachian thought, I was two years late. It was time to kill something. But Dad hadn’t put pressure on me. We were walking through four inches of snow in a…