Articles Available Online

It’s harder to leave your burning home after you’ve spent so much time cleaning its floors Watching those baseboards char should be enough to make any good woman lie back in bed and let it happen The fact that I got up and hauled Angela out with me is proof enough of my selfishness   The years with her father before the fire—when I still had my figure and the energy to walk about, the will and ability to be moved—passed with such seeming ease, but the truth of those days and the trouble they held is lost in the archives of memory’s drunken catalog Its delicate, age-soaked pages stay with me like an old phone book packed and moved out of some sentimental urge   If anyone has found an adequate response to that fiction of chemical and circumstance which is love, it is my Angela Even when she was a girl, she squirmed out of my grasp and kissed the kitchen table instead She was barely toddling and would force me with pleads and screaming to spend hours on the bridge over the county road, tucking flowers between its wooden slats   She shrank into a child’s malaise when they demolished the old post office The workers had dumped the remnants of the structure and covered it with a few buckets of sand, and she wept and reached for it This wasn’t her usual brand of sadness, the kind she had when her blanket was tumbling in the dryer and she could only watch from her crib, a few sweet tears on her cheek At the pile, she was hysterical I let her down and she stumbled toward it, tripping over her feet, grinding dirt into her hands and face, ruining her play clothes She kicked and crawled, wailing, scrabbling at the pile until finally her fingers found purchase She took hold and leaned back with her full weight, wrenching a brick free and inspiring a plume of dirt A man walking down the road stopped and stared She cleared the brick from the pile, covered it with her body, and was asleep