Stories I Might Want to Write Someday

My father gargling with a mouthful of Taboo pefume from the round-shouldered bottle that sat on the wooden dresser in the cabin-maids' room at Fishing Bridge, Yellowstone—belonging to one of the sisters from Wisconsin, the jet-haired one who would in a few years be my mother.

A white stretch limo sitting underneath a cottonwood tree beside a dry arroyo, off the lonely road between Pojoaque and Los Alamos.

The old man who came out each morning at ten or ten thirty, bundled up, and hollered at the street for maybe fifteen minutes, hollered and hollered, then disappeared inside again.

Jim, downstairs on Forest Avenue, telling me how he and his brother would swim the river where it came out into the ocean, cold knife between his teeth—playing at being pirates, and then opening oysters. How I never wanted to listen to his stories.


—Christie