RAINCOAT 

She kissed him on the side of his wrist, in the little hollow made by the bone by the thumb. It was her favorite spot to kiss, and until tonight it had cost her dearly every time she did it. But here in the dark, it was a useless trinket she felt safe taking freely, now that she was running away. He murmured in contentment. Only in sleep did he betray any sign of comfort at her touch. So, she did it again, now feeling generous, before gingerly moving his arm up and off over h

I am taking a ride in the night rain with Wesley. He is driving. The drops splatter against the windshield and catch the light of the street lamps. I tell Wesley that I want a glass car: it would be the closest I could get to the world as a greenhouse flower. I would look down and see the dusty asphalt blur between smudged shoe prints and my foot at the pedal. Wesley does not say anything. He keeps his eyes on the road--not just at the moment, but as a state of being. I am al

Eight months before he broke up with me, my boyfriend took me to the Mütter Museum, which for those of you who haven’t been, is a museum of medical oddities filled mostly with jars of partially disfigured but fully recognizable fetuses at various stages of development. The museum is fairly small, and almost always crowded. Lots of young children visit with their parents. They stand around transfixed, trying to reconcile the things they are seeing with their still untainted

March They talk almost the whole day, because they both wake up early and he goes to bed late so the three-hour time difference doesn't matter, really. Three hours and something like 2800 miles (he mapped it once) apart. After she leaves therapy she feels worse than when she came but that doesn't matter, really, because this is maybe the happiest she has ever been. There are no seasons in California but everything she does is now tinged with warm colors. They talk about hitch

They hurled themselves at one another with a forceful abandon that you might reserve in your mind for a particular kind of cathartic moment. I’d only personally experienced it during sex and during hard exercise. You throw all the energy you have in your body into moving. If you can just sustain a little bit longer, you’ll transcend to something or another. At first, staring at their faces and bodies punch holes in the air, I thought it might be in an attempt to purge aggress

Adhering to the destiny of her name, Stella felt content flying through the sky. She read a Murakami novel, turning bleached thin pages and sometimes pausing to look out the window. The plane coasted above cotton clouds through solid blue, and time may as well have stopped, like a suspended note in a song. Only when she glimpsed outside again and saw land rather than sky did she realize that six hours had passed, and she would soon land in Honolulu. This journey marked severa

Winnie saw the Grand Canyon in real life for the first time when she was 9, the summer after 3rd grade. Her mother had been a ranger there for a few years before Winnie was born, and made a long-awaited return to work as a human resources associate at the Grand Canyon National Park HQ, a beige slab of a building to the western edge of the park grounds. They drove up for the first day in a park jeep along a service road, and got out for their first shared view. Her mom had thi

Kids always want to sit at the front of the first subway car, which has the big plate-glass window, so that they can watch the big dark tunnel rushing towards them. Stella liked doing that too. She even resented the happy toddlers who took those seats before she could get to them. She even resented the grandmothers accompanying the toddlers, who would take up yet more front-car seats (and even you get there first, you have to offer your seats to them). So, on that day she cha

Los Angeles grew so much of its cement during wartime, growing aerospace on the land. During lunchtime, when a helicopter flies overhead, there is always a gathering gasp that passes through the kindergarteners’ collective chests as the noise gets closer, louder, and the air shakes above the tables. Those closest to the edge spill out from under the roof, and everyone else follows behind, some standing on benches and leaning out to get a look at what’s passing. Nobody is worr

My older sister likes to drink from the opposite end of her cup, like she's never without the hiccups. This is mostly true; every night, I set my sleep to the soft rhythm of her voice sticking, sticking, from the bed next to mine. The missing sound is how I know she is gone, even before I peek through slits of eyes in the thick blur of night to see how the outline of her body is lost from my line of vision. I didn't feel it, but I guess my sleep fled with my sister. There’s n