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Five Unusual Things I Saw At Doctor McVee’s The Summer I Turned Nine

An off-duty fireman who had sawed a fifty-five-gallon drum in half to make a double barbecue pit, then by accident had tipped one of the halves over with hot coals. The barrel had pinned his bare feet to his deck and broiled them.

La Calidad De La Vida

Every year my back goes out. It’s like a special anniversary, which I celebrate by groaning a lot and walking around like Groucho Marx with his tie caught in his zipper. This year it happens to me in Mexico, where I rent a large, brand-new, slightly leaky, four-bedroom house for sixty dollars a month in the medium-sized town of Jerez de Garcia Salinas, about eight hundred miles due south of El Paso, Texas.

After The Stillbirth

Afterward, I walked in graveyards, clearing away trash and fallen branches. I pulled up weeds that obscured the names on old headstones, though most of the names I revealed meant nothing to me. I took special care with the graves of children.

Cats And Dogs

Pills blessed by the Dalai Lama, Charlotte’s secret, bodies at the bottom of the freezer

This Is The Way We Say Goodbye

The nurse leads me into the family waiting room, sits down on the couch beside me, and opens Mother’s chart. She says that Mother has congestive heart failure, a leaky valve in her heart, chronic lung disease, and osteoarthritis. In addition to this, the bone scan shows that the malignant melanoma on her back has metastasized into her pelvis, spine, and skull.

The Cooking Lesson

A good fire, in fact, is like a perfect lie. It takes myriad shapes, it mesmerizes, it consumes itself and leaves nothing behind. Somehow, in my mind, the perfect fire and the perfect lie had always been intertwined.

Sunbeams

Some people think that doctors and nurses can put scrambled eggs back into the shell.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Where Life Begins

This spring I am almost thirty-nine, the cut-off age for success with most infertility treatments. Under thirty, thirty to thirty-four, thirty-nine and under, forty and up — these age categories used to seem so arbitrary, but now the startling difference in success rates between the last two is a measure of how much hope I have left.

Surviving The Fall

A Physician Comes Of Age

Now I gradually reconstructed the story of my father’s death, piece by piece. Despite the many gaping holes remaining, I realized that it was most likely not, as I had grown up believing, an accident. The truth was he hadn’t fallen from that window; he’d jumped.

Naked Before Strangers

My first strip jobs were down in Chicago, secretarial pools and bachelorette parties where the girls squealed and ran their hands along my abs and up over my pecs. My old man would shit one of his very own bricks if he ever found out what I do.