I’ve never seen my birth certificate, but I know what it says. I can see the angular font in my head, bold blocky letters spelling out my name: Hannah-Sophie Vester. Perhaps the ink, thick and sticky, smudged just a little and that’s where that mark, printed defiantly between Hannah and Sophie, came from. Just a typo, a wayward smudge. Another look, though, and who wouldn’t recognize the hyphen for what it is?
“While I believe in the pipe dream that colleges should give each student, no matter how sparkly, the same care and attention, my more grounded argument is this: Why does worthiness stop being ‘holistic’ after students of color have been accepted to college?”
“That could be anyone, I think. The beach, the cliffs, the moon, just something with a voice that sounds like Margaret. The ocean could have picked up her accent and dissolved it, carried what I know as Margaret—black hair, sports bra, raspy voice—and released its latent sound into the cold wind, back to me. A lure.”
In the past month I’ve read loads of Greek classics. It was a really depressing month filled with people killing their kids, kids killing their parents, people marrying their parents, people stabbing other people in their eyes or at least stabbing themselves in their eyes. It seems like these things were so common in ancient Greece that sacrificial infanticide became unimportant enough that Homer left it out of why the Achaeans won the Trojan War.
I reach into my bag, the wrapper crinkles, and, suddenly, I think I want to climb a mountain. Well, I take that back. I’m rather un-athletic, my legs are disproportional to my body, and recently I’ve developed an incessant rattling cough, so I know that that’s a poor idea.
From “The Assumption,” a short play based on the medieval Lives of the Virgin. The hero is Mario, a college freshman struggling with his sexuality who mistakes an undiagnosed case of appendicitis for a pregnancy. In this scene, he has been confiding in Lupe, the dorm’s janitress, who reveals herself to be the Virgen de Guadalupe; they are speaking Spanish, which sounds like unrhymed English verse.
I began insisting that my first car would be very small, very fast and very Italian. That should have been the first indication of my impending age-related crisis. There would be no minivan for my children. Oh no. Only a … Read More
One of my closest friends called recently after a bad breakup. We hadn’t spoken in a few weeks, so when I picked up the phone, I felt that familiar yet uncomfortable sense of separation caused by more than just physical distance.
