What if -- and I'm just spitballing here -- we all got together and agreed to add a little dignity to that rickety old hamster wheel of theater? How about not messaging actors at the last minute with sides for TOMORROW? How about messaging a playwright to say, yes, we got your submission that you worked so hard on and ::thank you::? How about an end to the y...

We are capable of rich and life-altering intimacy--however fleeting--with the oldest of comrades, and the newest of acquaintances. We can step away from the empty pleasantries that distance us from others and that "mask" the ill-mannered insecurities that cause us to neurotically and compulsively apologize for our chronic truancy and bad behavior.

We can ackn...

You can exhale and close the heavy door behind you, wrestle it shut if you have to. You can lean against the inside of it and even click the lock, it’s up to you. You can choose not to be so damned accommodating of the hands and voices that pull at you and call your name. You can let them solve their own problems.

After all, you’re in here, behind t...

When Anna had lived with Walter for about a month, he decided to surprise her after school one day. He watched her board the bus and then he got busy moving her things into the master bedroom. He transferred his things into the spare room down the hall. It was right to give her this space, he thought, with the enormous windows and the private bath. He wanted...

It occurred to Walter, that if he would simply write his house number on the side of his trash can -- along with a few choice expletives -- it would render the can far less desirable to poachers. And it was this thinking that had him standing outside in his bathrobe at 2 AM with a can of orange Liquitex. "Five. Two. Seven. Maple." He counted aloud as he spra...

The morning light is just lovely streaming through the enormous windows here. The veteran all of 15 minutes, I tell them that the seat next to me is free if they want to sit across from each other. She smiles sweetly and says no that's okay, he can sit next to me. I notice his face for the first time. He is warm. When he smiles it feels humble, it feels genu...

Walter stood at the window of his unfurnished living room and watched his daughter saunter off toward the grouping on the corner. Each day he kept count. Would she turn and wave this time? It depended on her mood, he had deduced. Except that sometimes between the time she bounded down the stairs and reached her crowd of adoring fans on the corner, her mood w...

Walter was a man of science. He knew how to repair space modules and calculate the speeds of solar winds. But terrestrial conundrums were alien to him. Still, he believed that if he could learn the reasons for crying he might eventually find a moment of actual peace. But today was not that day. She scowled at him in the mirror with her senile hair and resist...

I believed that you would tell me when we'd had enough. I don't know why I thought I'd never get to it on my own. I think there must have been a time when I was younger when I lost my voice. When I gave it up for whomever wanted to lead. Funny how that happens. It was because I wanted safety, maybe? I wanted to know that I could follow, and if I could follow...

I want to rewind to the part before our hearts shattered all to hell and we knew any better or anything at all and just sit here at the sno-cone stand until our tongues turn purple and the sun melts into the pond. We can feed the geese and that one cute turtle and you can tell me again about your plans to save the world and I can rattle on about the hole in...

Passing Milfin, passing Loxley. You say don’t you remember coming down here, two lanes and those azaleas, demented, big as houses, bringing down the gutters. Squinting for the memories, so dark on this stretch and nothing feels familiar. It was easy peasy "59," now with the grown-up name. "Parkway" makes it a parkway. Everybody knows that. I'm sorry...where...

I was sitting at a little table at Maiwand Kabob in Columbia the other day. In walks this fetching red head and she’s looking around for someone. She stood there rather nervously “waiting.” The place was very busy and the wait staff was slow. It was a night of waiting, all around. She stood there for a few moments and then her face lit up and turned three sh...

When you were out with your girlfriend down in the boondocks and your truck got stuck in the mud and there was no way to call someone to pull you out and no GPS to tell you where the nearest house was or gas station and no smart phone to keep your brain alive until it died along with the car battery from playing Eagles Greatest Hits Volume II on endless repe...

When I finally laid claim to the anguish in my own heart. When I understood it was of my own creation. I could begin to forgive myself for enslaving others to carry what was not theirs to carry. Something about ownership. It seems to me that our daughters are not taught about unrest. About what to do with the silence. We know to fill it with noise. With acti...

I cannot know you the way you know you. The way your brother knows you. The way your lover does. But I can hear your heart bursting, and I know it to be human like mine. I know your pain is a vast caldera, the void endless and un-refillable. I know this because I see it in your eyes, how they've lost half their light, how they search the horizon. I know this...