The sky is low; the September sun is tender; and the bright orange of life guards’ swimsuits and umbrellas has been replaced by the green of fully clothed Parks and Recreation officers.
On December 16, 2012, a young physiotherapy student and her friend, who happens to be a boy, board a bus after watching The Life of Pi in a multiplex in New Delhi.
When a stray dog broke into the family garden one afternoon, my cat chased him back out onto the street.
The thing is, I don’t even like dogs. In my world, dogs are either small, yappy things that gnaw your ankles or monsters that slobber on your sundresses.
I twiddle with the radio during the four-hour drive from the airport in Midland, Texas, to Big Bend National Park… Now, the airwaves match the landscape: vacant.
My barber Ben cut hair in Auschwitz. He spent three and a half years in a darkness in which it would seem impossible for anything to have grown, including hair.
“I said, can you get me something to eat bitch?” I stiffen. This is early on in my emergency medicine residency and I haven’t yet learned to reply, “That’s Doctor bitch to you, sir.”
When my father said the word predisposed, I felt a twinge of nerves. We were having “the talk.” Not the one about birds or bees, but something bigger and scarier that my brother and I would have to inevitably face…
I was eight years old the first time my father pawned his wedding ring for drug money. When the fight started, I was standing heedlessly behind my mother thinking about birds.
You are wearing your purple knee-length dress because it’s the most pomp and circumstance you could muster for this day. Your brown flats are not so festive – you want to bend down and rub the scuff off the left one, but you don’t care enough.
