Archives

Hoax

In the hoax tent across from me sat Dr. Patel I think. Hard to tell with that mask, but her eyes were familiar, from other days when we wore no masks and huddled together for rounds and codes and could read each others’ lips, not eyes teeming with terror. Like now. When we each caught […]

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A Christmas Story

While Black Bart was getting his you were getting yours – sodium bicarb calcium gluconate D50 – not with a Red Ryder BB gun, but a triple lumen CVC, ‘as beautiful, as coolly deadly-looking a piece of weaponry as I’d ever laid eyes on.’ Bullets to save, not slay – Mannitol 3% sodium Zosyn. Your […]

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Leap Day

Does everyone carry all of their memories around with them, like an airport teeming with stranded passengers during an unexpected blizzard on the night before Thanksgiving?  Look, there’s thirteen year-old me, balancing The Heart is a Lonely Hunter on her knee, glancing up only to roll her eyes at 1977 Wonder Woman, about to board […]

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A Wrinkle in Time

I used to be ashamed of the wrinkles on my face. Especially the big, long one right across the middle of my forehead. This deep groove, my own river of embedded worries dating as far back as first grade, has been a part of me for almost as long. A child with an ever present […]

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Charlie’s Angels 

The bridge actually had an official name. Lucy? Commissioner Lucy? It didn’t matter. We didn’t know who he was. What we saw was the dripped, spray-painted white                            KHOMEINI SUCKS! right there in the middle of the worn pavement, starting to now wear […]

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Guilt

His mother decided to name him Joseph, since their last name was Klein, and it seemed droll enough to her that he should spend his life being called Joseph K. She expected he would be surrounded by other Josephs in his life – which, in fact, he was – and, thus, be distinguished from them […]

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Boots

The cool thing about the internet is that you can look up stuff like, “What day of the week was January 19, 1978?” It was a Thursday. On Thursday, January 19, 1978 (a school night), I slept over my best friend Lia’s house. The only reason this had been allowed was that a snowstorm was […]

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I Want My Weather Channel

Does anyone else in the NYC area miss the Weather Channel with a profound unhappiness, or is it just me?  It’s awful enough we have to weather this potential snowstorm (yes, I went there) minus El Bloombito’s crack Spanish admonitions, which I’ve only recently – begrudgingly, barely, really – accepted. His absence in the circus […]

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The Wet Spot

On a dark, desert highway. No…just kidding. On a dark, living room carpet, a cool spot at my feet, the warm realization arose that I had stepped on a pretty decent-sized spot of German shepherd urine. Danced, that is. Or something akin to danced, but probably more like non-rhythmic jumping. Whatever it was, my foot […]

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Ride

Often, distracted, she almost hit the gas instead of the brakes. While first learning to drive, her stomach would drop in that infinitesimal moment during which she had to decide. Brakes or gas. Brakes or gas. Thankfully, though, she had always chosen correctly – later laughing with her mom as she pulled into the closest […]

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