Word Count 739

Early in her career, my mother wrote copy for a fashion magazine where she learned to imitate how the models regarded themselves in the mirror. The pose. One leg slightly forward and bent, head held up, eyes on high beam, a look that broadcast, "I'm stunning."

Only my five-foot-odd Cockney mother could take full pleasure in posing the same way--one stocky peasant leg thrust forward, her head with its untamed mane held high, her eyes gleaming with unalloyed delight.

Whenever I watched her, getting ready for work, or an evening out, I'd wonder, "Who the hell do you think you are?“

I was also, however, becoming aware that reality can be malleable, shape-shifting. A concept that thrilled and unnerved me.

Word Count 1143

When my siblings and I packed up our parents’ house in preparation for selling it to pay for their care, we unhooked no less than fourteen mirrors from the walls. My mother disliked looking in mirrors, just as she disliked having her photograph taken, but she delighted in the light that they catch and throw.

Before they became so terribly sick, I sometimes prowled their home with my camera. One of my favourite photographs is of the oval mirror in my father’s bedroom. Although he and I had a fractious relationship, when I look at this image I feel a tenderness close to love.

Word Count 1124

I was desperate to live alone. As the youngest of four children, I had always shared a bedroom with a sister; in boarding school, we were all assigned doubles, the better, I suppose, to acquire the patience necessitated by shared living. But I had already mastered that art! Stupid, then, to go to college in New York City where living alone is a fever dream only to be achieved by the very rich.

Right before graduation my grandfather, who owned a gas station in Amarillo, Texas, died and left me $10,000. It was more money than I had ever had, but it wasn’t life changing money. One Sunday, while scanning the New York Times real estate listings, I came across a listing for an apartment on Riverside Drive for $30,000. This was an unheard of price for an apartment in that neighborhood of stately limestones and aged intellectuals like Hannah Arendt. If I put 20% of my inheritance down, I could just swing the mortgage. I went to the Open House trembling with hope.

Word Count 790

When I was about seven years old, I had that moment where you look around and say to yourself, “I live here!” That simple sentence carries extraordinary emotion and weight, not to mention confusion. I live here, on this street, in this city?

That night I said to my mother, “Isn’t it amazing that we live here, in this flat, in Montreal?” I wanted her to share in my wonder that there was this world, and I had just discovered I had a place in it.

“Don’t remind me,” she said.

Word Count 1446

In San Juan, in the bedroom where I spent most of my early childhood, a full-length mirror hung on the inside of the closet door. Our family had moved from Puerto Rico to New York City a few years earlier, but we kept the apartment on Joffre Street. My sister and I were down there on a school break, and I sat alone, cross-legged on the tile floor staring at my reflection, trying to separate my younger, mischievous self from my now shy and uncertain one. I was thirteen. Blue, for the first time, was a feeling throughout my body rather than a color to behold, and I painted a self-portrait.

Word Count 764

At 8:00 a.m. workers arrive to install our new heating and cooling system. I steel myself for a day of noise and disruption. My husband has a studio, our converted garage, for his painting and music, so he’s not distracted by what goes on in the house. My office is a small den open to the living room; much of the work will take place a few feet away. Will I be able to work? Do I need to? It’s a beautiful day, sunny and mild. I’m a half-hour walk from Balboa Park. I could sit on a sunny bench with a book; I could go to one of the park’s museums, have lunch at my choice of lovely spots. I could visit a friend, go to the library, get a pedicure. I could, but despite the commotion, I prefer to stay home.

Word Count 465

Since I left for college I have lived in eleven places. Some dwellings brief, others with the false expectation that it would be forever. Each had its comforts as well as difficulties, be they structural or relational. The furniture I dragged from apartment to house back to yet another apartment did give a sense of familiarity making it feel “homey”, but if I was unsettled within myself, or focusing on someone else's happiness, no chest of drawers could comfort.

For a few years I lived in an ashram where I practiced meditation to discover “the home within”. I found a potent place of inner silence unbound by walls or body – a“home” no matter where I was or with whom.

Word Count 429

“My clock is ticking!” Marisa Tomei stomped her very high-heeled foot on the porch. Years ago, when I had a working uterus, I transcribed that scene from “My Cousin Vinny” on the back of a paper napkin, repeatedly reversing my VHS until I captured it correctly. Afterward, I would practice it in front of my mirror until I got her sass just right.

Today I am not pumping a pair of heels but rather lying in my hospital bed post-hysterectomy and all I can hear is the loud tick of the second hand of the large wall clock beside my bed. It seems to deliberately taunt me second by second, louder on the upswing, quieter as it winds down to the 6 at the bottom.

Word Count 1092

As I approach my seventieth birthday, I grow more enamored of beginnings: No clock should constrict the imagination’s reach.

As a child, I associated time and its measurement with constraint in the deadening silence enforced by the nuns in elementary school. When we put our heads down on our desks for prayer and reflection, the ticking of the school clock punctuated our collective boredom: How long could we endure this excruciating stillness? Time was nothing but a burden, and clocks were its punishing implements.

Word Count 409

At first I could not understand why everyone was so excited about the cicadas. They're coming, they're coming, wait for it, they're coming — then suddenly the ground was riddled with bullet holes and the air filled with insect sirens. Out crawled the nymphs who stuck themselves to the foliage shoulder to shoulder, much the way the cockroaches used to coat the counters and floors of the houses we rented in Austin during the late 70s, only the cicadas do not run when you slam the door and turn on the lights. Instead, they wildly shrill their unceasing raucous chorus, an aural carpet-bomb of car alarms and can openers.

Are they really so much better than any other big, greasy-looking bug?

Word count 1184

The Husband stops me in the hallway. “I’ve got ticks in my bed,” he says. Maybe he wants to abandon the guestroom and return to the bedroom formerly known as ours. That’s how I think during our divorce.

He looks up from his smartphone. “A whole mess of them.” He shifts the suitcase strap higher up the shoulder of his blue Hugo Boss jacket. He flashes his conference smile. “Big meetings in DC,” he says. “I’m getting closer to the power source.”

I avoid looking into his dark, electric eyes. “Good for you,” I say.

Days later our nine-year-old, Milo, comes into the kitchen scratching either side of his stomach. Hanks of dark hair, like his dad’s, cover his square face. He scootches between me and the pancake pan. Bubbles grow and pop in the circles of batter.

Word Count 650

Marriage is complicated. Divorce is messy. After twenty years in a relationship with a woman, after numerous therapists, couples counseling sessions, tearful and angry nights, I finally spurted out in a session that I wanted to separate.

It was as much a surprise to me as it was to my partner, as I had always been the one begging to work it out. By some force of strength summoned at just the right moment, like an uncontrollable unexpected sneeze, I declared my emancipation. The room was silent. The therapist quietly waiting, my partner in silent shock, my heart pounding, I realized that there was no turning back.

Word Count 1315

I came home from work one night to find my door unlocked: someone had picked the lock and broken in. When I left my husband, I brought very few possessions to my new home: a rust-colored futon, the sole living room furniture by day and the bed at night; a small table with a single chair for eating; and a chest of drawers just beyond the arch that defined the two sections of the room.

Now the first thing I saw when I walked in was a soiled white gardening glove on that chest of drawers—a taunt in plain sight. My heart rushed upward into my chest, constricting my breath. I’d felt nested in my new home; now I was utterly exposed.

Word Count 428

Once, as a teenager—bored with studying, anxious over my pending SATs—I asked my mother if I absolutely had to go to college. After all, she hadn’t, nor had my father or older sister. Why was it expected of me?

“I hope you go,” she answered, “and that you’ll come out speaking beautifully.”

We lived in Far Rockaway, a thin strip of Queens flanked by the Atlantic ocean and Jamaica Bay, and what my mother meant was that she hoped my education might wash away the outer-borough New Yorkese that she, my father, sister, and nearly everyone around us spoke. Awe in our coffee. Don’t when doesn’t was called for. Potato and window both ending in a…

Word Count 1,285

Because I was new to Turkey, I had many questions.

When do I switch to informal tense?

Was that a dancing bear I saw chained to a tree across from the Dolmabahçe?

How do you say, “Stop following me?”

Now, I had another question. One I had never posed. I was in a café with Maria and the man I would ask. His name was Cengiz. I had spent time kissing him. He wanted to sleep with me. Cengiz was 19 years old. Too young, really.

Maria and I were in our mid-20s. We’d lived abroad. We were veteran language learners. And over the next three months, we would be learning a new language on its home turf. All the parts of speech. Including the invisible, unspoken parts. The rules that have nothing to do with verbs or nouns. We were learning these rules daily, over tea. Mostly, by making mistakes.

Word Count 1,534

I’ve had a headache for thirty days. OK, I’m lying. It’s closer to sixty, but sixty days sounds terribly long. Terribly scary. I know it’s been closer to sixty days because my niece was visiting, and the day she left to go back home was a Sunday, and it was four days before her twenty-seventh birthday, which is not important to this story, but those facts are how I remember that it’s been close to sixty days now with this constant headache that is sometimes dull and mildly annoying, but sometimes severe. Always, all day long. I wake with it. I go to sleep with it. It never leaves me alone, neither the pain of it nor the psychological impact.

Word Count 716

Since both my marriages are long over, thoughts of my wedding attire emerge draped in a veil of nostalgia, though in fact the pieces themselves are in my closet upstairs, were I inclined to pull them out and marvel that I ever fit into them.

Look, he said, you can have this.

I squinted at the screen.

Or this.

Heart-shaped, he was saying. Square. Distinguished. His finger pointing, my eyes following, the computer screen alit with versions, visions, transfigurations into pretty.

 Imagine being pretty.