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Pictures of You: Paul Myette

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“The Willows,” by  Paul Myette

 

Fullscreen capture 3222015 93128 AMHis parents bought him a popcorn ball to show him that everything was fine, to keep him from asking if everything was fine. It worked. For a while it worked. They smiled and said of course, of course as they handed it to him. He knew better. He saw the frustration in his father’s face, the hurt in his mother’s, but they only bought him treats on the days when they were good. The popcorn ball, brown with caramel, dotted with peanuts, allowed him to accept their fiction.

He struggled with it. He sat on a bench and tried to eat. The circumference was too much for his mouth, but he bit at it over and again, struggling to gain purchase with his bottom teeth. He thought if he could pull even one kernel free from the rest then he could take it from there. The process coated his chin with a layer of caramel. Every third bite or so he’d stop and lick this, pushing his tongue as far down past his lip as he could. His hands grew sticky beyond cleaning. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Ashley Inguanta

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“DEDICATION: TO THE REGISTRAR,” by Ashley Inguanta

Fullscreen capture 3222015 92402 AMYears ago, I wrote a poem before boarding an airplane. A dream of mine: When I was a young girl, I held my grandfather’s hand, and we ran. I was a monster, growing. He had the greenest eyes. I remember ghosts. I remember how–after the poem, after the dream—I turned to gold when I kissed my lover, when I kissed her hair. I remember when I thought all of this made sense once, when I drove past palm trees and all things wild. It was in my DNA to love hard.

The dream of my grandfather: There is another man who has never showed up in any of my dreams, but he is also my blood. He had a scar between his eyes. Tell me—when you saw him, when you marked down his features, when you scanned his face—did you see a young girl forming from his DNA, from those lines, from his dark complexion, from the scar between his eyes? I want to know, how did he speak to you? He filled out his draft card, World War II. His body belonged to America. Did he know this? Tell me. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Cynthia Hawkins

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“Disembodied,” by Cynthia Hawkins

Fullscreen capture 3192015 63125 AMThis is me, age seven, pretending to be a disembodied head.  I imagined the camera couldn’t see the rest of me behind the sofa.  I’d taken pains to arrange the pillow just so.  If I’d known the gag was ruined, I wouldn’t be smiling.

Sometimes I was a disembodied head on an armrest.  Sometimes I was a sideways disembodied head appearing to float up and down a doorframe while the rest of me was upright behind the wall.  Sometimes I was a disembodied head at a jaunty angle appearing to float from side to side atop the high back of mom’s upholstered chair while the rest of me was shuffling in a crouch on the shag rug puckered around the chair’s ball-and-claw feet.  Sometimes I’d slip my arms inside my sweater and let the loose sleeves flap as I asked every family member, “Hey! Where’d my arms go!”   Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Ellen Parker

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“See Here,” by Ellen Parker

Fullscreen capture 3162015 82811 PMThis little boy is my dad. Someone gave me this photo of him shortly after he died. I’d never seen it before then. After someone dies, after the person is no longer available to be looked at, how come people relinquish all these pictures they’ve been stockpiling?

Maybe the mindset is: Now that this person is gone, you might want some clues as to who he was.

In fact, yes. I’ve been looking for clues. I’ve been looking all my life.

Notice his hands. They don’t look like little-kid hands. When he was 74 years old and in the hospital, dying—actually, dead; a machine was doing his breathing, but we were still hoping—I watched his hands rest against the sheets. They didn’t look like old-guy hands. They were the same hands you see in the photo. A little chubbier, though. Fleshier. A little younger. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Alia Yunis

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“Two” by Alia Yunis

 

Fullscreen capture 3132015 21822 PMBaghdad, Circa 1958

This is a photo of my mom and her fellow teachers on the train in Baghdad, which my mom used to say was their weekend escape to the big city.  My mom and her friends were Palestinians and Egyptians who at 18 years old were sent by their families to help out with finances by teaching newly oil-rich Kuwaiti girls Arabic, English and math.  It reminds me that  Baghdad once meant hope, sophistication and fun, not tragedy and terror. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Holly Robinson

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“Why Are the Men in Your Novels So Nice?” by Holly Robinson

Fullscreen capture 3132015 20546 PM

Recently, I was talking to a book club about my latest novel when a woman demanded, “Why are the men in your novels so nice?”

The woman said the word “nice” like it was a deadly contagious disease, or maybe a tricky tax question. I stumbled through an answer about writing emotional family mysteries with dark secrets, and how I try to give readers a beacon of hope by the end of each novel.

However, the real answer is simpler, I realized later: the men in my novels are nice because I have a great brother. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Jordan E. Rosenfeld

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“The Children Aren’t Smiling,” by Jordan E. Rosenfeld

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My 8th birthday. No one means to tell the truth in this photograph but it can’t be stopped, its slow seepage rises up like flood waters. First glance offers happiness: all smiles, such good times.

You’ll find me bottom left, crouched in a pout. The full effect of my costume can’t be seen: not the Flamenco skirt and my mother’s brown boots, the lacy shirt and the veil atop my birthday hat. I marched out back, stuck hands on hips, but nobody even turned a head. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Victoria Barrett

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“First Apartment, Spring 1996,” by Victoria Barrett

 

Fullscreen capture 352015 85722 AMIn the fall of 1995 I was twenty-one years old, living with my mother in an apartment in my hometown. I had flunked out of college that spring and slunk home with my head hanging, vacillating between deep, deep shame and panic. I was a Smart Kid. My smartness had, growing up, been the only thing about me that mattered. What I wanted once I was on my own at school was to be loved, smart or no: loved by family, loved by a boy, loved by friends. Failing that, I would have liked to be admired. Failing that, well, I didn’t know what I wanted. That summer and fall I worked a day job dispatching truck drivers and waited tables at night, convinced I was the kind of loser who had already done at age twenty-one every worthwhile thing she’d ever do. I wanted to go back to school—I was determined that I would—but more immediately, I needed to live somewhere else. The fights were getting nastier and more severe. My mother had been hitting me, throwing at me whatever came to hand, telling me she wished I hadn’t been born since I was twelve. By this time there was nothing left but the fighting. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Asha Rajan

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Fullscreen capture 352015 84900 AM“Ammamma,” by Asha Rajan

I met my maternal grandmother when I was six months old. It was my first trip to our ancestral home, the youngest of her grandchildren, the last of the matrilineal line. Every Summer holiday after that was spent there.

I wish I could have known her as an adult. I wish I had had the foresight to ask all the questions that come to me now, to niggle out the details of her life, her ambitions, her desires, her disappointments. But that’s not to be. Thirty years ago, on the 9th of February, when I was 15 and she was 85, my Ammamma, my Mothermother, died. Hers was not an easy death, not a slow waning with time for goodbyes, not a death she had been prepared for in any way. I know this because I was with her in those last gasping moments. I was the only one of her family with her, and at 15, I was inadequately equipped to deal with all I experienced. Continue reading →