Essays

If I hadn’t been reading Nancy Drew that day, we probably wouldn’t have gone to the haunted house.

We’d all heard the rumors. Of a white van. And its frightening pilot: a woman whose giant eyes stood on the edges of their sockets, threatening to jump. The Bug-Eyed Lady. The name spread like head lice through my elementary school, as did her alleged crimes.

Fanfiction was like the seedy underground labyrinth of the internet, a place for extreme fangirls and boys to daydream about their favorite characters in new situations, like children playing make-believe with their dolls. It was a foreign world to me, one I had only a marginal interest in learning more about.

I know that he loved the golf channel and the shelf of cereal boxes in the pantry, the dog and us and the big glasses of ice water he drank with his dinner. But he never really nested in that house the way the rest of us did. When my parents divorced, all he took with him was his clothing, tied up in big black leaf bags with the wire hangers poking out.

Every place I hike is a graveyard, and each bed I make on the earth is made atop death.

You can write anywhere. Just make sure you show up ready to do the job.