Writing

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“Put some pants on, walking around like that,” Cobie told her husband, who had wandered into the kitchen in his white t-shirt and underwear, tufts of dark hair on his skinny legs. She cleared empty coffee cups and breakfast plates from the kitchen table of the house they had rented four months earlier, their first in America. 

“What?” Willem said. He had propped himself against the counter, smoking his first Chesterfield King of the day. “No one can see.” He looked down at himself and spread his arms like wings as if to prove that his wife was making a fuss over nothing, ash falling to the floor. 

Cobie tended to an oversized metal wash tub on the stove, stirring its contents with a long pair of tongs meant for grilling. The container spanned all four burners, each on high. Inside, multiple pairs of white painter’s pants and white shirts were on the boil, each covered in multicolored paint specks and splotches. Once a month, Cobie took on the impossible task of attempting to bubble away weeks of oil-based paint and stains. “Your daughter, she can see,” she said in her thick accent, her back to her husband, poking and stirring the contents on the stove.

Willem dismissed her with a wave she couldn't see.

Marcia sat at the family's wobbly kitchen table in her checkered flannel nightgown, a half-eaten bowl of cereal in front of her, feet dangling above the vinyl floor. She stared at her parents, only partially understanding what was being said in their new language. "See what?"

A week after the accident, I made plans to meet the attorney my mother had hired at the storage lot where my father’s work truck had been towed. She wanted to take pictures for a potential lawsuit, and I wanted to see if there was anything worth salvaging: house painter’s tools of the trade like a sprayer, brushes, roller skins, perhaps some gallons of intact paint, maybe some work receipts or paperwork he’d kept in the truck. Remnants of what his life looked like that day.

“Be prepared for what you might see,” she warned me. She wore heels and tip-toed serpentine through the lot, damp and muddy from the previous day's fall rain.

“Yes,” I said. Words to live by. 

"Small Comforts," The Swannanoa Review  2025 Best of the Net Nominee 

"Normal People," Sycamore Review  2023 Wabash Prize for Fiction Finalist

"Posing," Ascent

"Baby," Other Voices

"Normal People," Euphemism 

"Restorations," Rambunctious Review, First Prize

"Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grand Jatte," Rambunctious Review, First Prize

"The Girl on the Bubble," Warren Wilson Review

"The Things You Remember," 2024 Central Oregon Writers Guild anthology

"A Place Called Normal," 2023 Central Oregon Writers Guild anthology

"The Measure of All Things," Willow Review

"Posing," (alternate v.), Willow Review, First Place

"Mourning," Willow Review