“Wasp & Orchid”
Arkansas International
“My mother is born and raised in New Albany, Indiana, a small town opposite Louisville, Kentucky just across the Ohio River. From my mother’s bedroom window, she can see the K&I Bridge that leads into Kentucky; she can almost hear the river rushing. My mother grows up on the corner of Dewey and Butler, at 1631 Dewey Street, a Victorian two-story painted white with a small yard, five doors from the house where her mother—my grandmother—lived from eight years old—1613 Dewey Street.”
“Where It Starts”
Oxford American
“My mother has always been fearful, double-checking doors are locked, alarm set. She sleeps with a baseball bat, knives in the top nightstand drawer. Insists on wooden rods in windows despite locks, always leaves a porch light on. Long after our German shepherd dies, she keeps up BEWARE OF DOG signs. She read once that a dog’s bark deters break-ins so she buys an alarm that sounds aggressively whenever its sensors are set off. She answers the front door yelling at a nonexistent dog, ‘Get back, get back, stay!’”
“Not a Tracing: A Map”
What Things Cost:
An Anthology for the People
“As a child in Indiana, my mother was often beaten by her mother, whose blueblack rage filled all corners of the house, her hands gripping the whip or paddle or belt, whatever was in reach. “You knew her mood by the pounding of her steps as she walked up the stairs,” my mother tells me. She grew up in fear, afraid to tell her mother when she’d compound-fractured her elbow, worried she’d be told to get a switch off the front tree for the hassle and cost of a doctor’s visit. She slept on the broken arm until her mother discovered the blood in her bed.”