A bucket

Two feet past the busy woodpile, Igor’s fury and the stillness that reigned after the trees cracked. The baby restless. The rampage. A bucket and all it could hold.   CLICK ON THE RECORDING TO LISTEN

Schoolyard in Cuetzalan

Could you live here? he asked, meaning the trumpets and the bone-rattling streets, the crisp white shirts and someone forever sweeping a sidewalk to dust. Could you? he asked, meaning our son, unborn, and our daughter’s lily white hand.   Darling, a part of us always will. CLICK ON RECORDING TO LISTEN

4-week baby nursing

It all comes down to this he said, Curious. That it all should come down. That it, in its sprawling it-ness, could, or would ever be, felled. The whole shebang. The whole enchilada. Kaput.   Perhaps he meant this: the wide world shrunk to one room where everything that matters is this man, sleeping, his…

Two rubber ducks

A drama unfolds in this metropolis of bubbles — two lost on the high seas, their magic carpet no match for the vortex raging past the plug and down the pipes and under the asphalt, out into the harbour and through the narrows toward Ireland and beyond.   Saved by a girl with a watchful…