Essay Corral

Three new essays out, rounded up here for your bemusement. "There Was the Occasional Disruption" at The Fiddleback,

Weirdness lurked in corners of fenced yards and basements of split-level homes. Afternoons were orderly, of a piece, as we played aside the pleasant, luminous surfaces of homes and yards. Ugliness: acid creeping from a neighbor’s pool into your yard; the stink of rotting food behind a restaurant; the sticky nests of spiders inside the abandoned milk case. (“Life is tough; thank God there’s design,” said Paola Antonelli.)

 "Origin Stories" at Sweet,

This was my home’s doppelganger, my tree’s parallel house, a blueprint of floor and wall and roof that I drew in my head, every day up there in the trees against the fading sunlight, a dream as substantial as the structure I dreamt in.

 "The Blur Family" at Waccamaw,

I’ve written a bit about this incident before, naming the participants, implicating myself—but that was before I saw the girl, the woman, in her present life. Before, I had only the blur, the reassuring haze which erased her features, replaced her worrying cries with the whoops of play-dates, her urgent escape from the woods with cart wheels into suburbia. Now she’s looking at me from last week, not last century.