Lifeline


When I was a child my mother would often sit vigil by my bedside. Many nights, she would take my palm and with the crescent of her thumbnail, finish my short lifeline. In her mind, she believed that she was extending my time in this world. Later, older, I grew to resent, even hate the gesture- It felt, for me, like so many of mom's habits, hovering, overprotective. But all that was yet to come. In those earliest of moment, suffused with the warm low glow of dresser lights- mom bent her head And we believed in immortality.



Inheritance

The tones of Vietnamese were the earliest I heard, they took root in my brain.


Lab Rat

You'll feed the animals a substance you can't yet call "remedy" or "poison"