At the time, this seemed a cool but token title—why would we need to steward liberty? At the time, it didn’t occur to me that all six of us “Stewards of Liberty” were white.
When the nurse wakes me, the woman is gone as are most of the other patients. “Would you like a wheelchair for the way out?”, she asks, no longer using a voice that suggests we’re peers.
“No,” I lie, trying not to lean too obviously against the wall while I wait for my fiancé to bring the car around.
I make my husband crazy sometimes (a lot of the times) because it seems things are always, always going wrong. Before this years-long bout of depression, I often cooed, “It’ll be okay,” and he glared back and ask “how?”
By Amy Fowler
Several years ago, my mom started existing in a parallel but alternate reality. Her interdimensional trips began slowly at first, with the...
Unlike actual gay people, you really did choose to make your life more difficult, to let us say those things about you, to hide so much of your life from so many.
I am suspicious of the moms who tell me that being an empty nester is the best thing yet. They have huge smiles on their faces and I know they mean to reassure me when they say they often don’t even bother cooking dinner now.
It’s funny how much time is spent on forgetting until someone says consider the female orgasm in fiction or some such, and the world opens up, and you are struck, again, by all that dew and possibility.
“Dada, can you help me find . . . Dada, you cry?”
“Yup, I’m crying. I’m just feeling a little sad. Daddies cry sometimes. It’s OK for Daddies — ”
“Dada, can you help me find my pink and purple My Little Pony?
She put on her glasses, sat cross-legged on the divan facing the living room window, with her knees slightly raised, and started unraveling the sweater, wrapping the yarn around her knees multiple times to make elliptical-shaped bunches
I don’t believe in fairy tales like heaven and hell, or purgatory and spirits who can hear you when you speak to them but when I visit her, I tell her I am sorry anyway, I tell her I wish I had been more brave.
But despite our differences, in our late teens we unintentionally formed a great bond when I gave her a few of the pills I had gotten from our doctor-father, the ones whose floaty-detached effect we grew to love.
My time is up, living this way: half-covered, flame low, a partial existence caught in the wide expanse of fear’s shadow. The forces that send any of us anywhere, the bring us together and tear us apart, that render the world one of light or one of darkness, of warmth or cold or wind or calm—they are beyond our reach.
