When I was a child, my father taught me a trick about how to make yourself wake up at a certain time if you didn’t have an alarm clock handy or even how to remember something you had to do the next morning when you went to bed. He said that what you should do was to picture a blank blackboard, like the kind I knew from school, and then picture yourself picking up a piece of chalk and writing on the blackboard exactly what you wanted to remember the next day. “Try it and see,”

My dreamscape shifts, images fading in and out of consciousness. The flickering movie speeds up, then slows, finally resolving into something recognizable: My kitchen. The room is filled with a flat light that casts few shadows, the middle world. A dark-haired woman sits at my cherry wood dining table, examining bone china teacups neatly arranged on a silver tray as if I'd been expecting company. "Your mother loved these," the woman says, holding a translucent white cup wit

Delisia considered herself to be the good daughter. Blond and slight, she had majored in economics before going on to get a master’s degree in architecture, her ambition driving her to apply for scholarships and marry her way into a higher income bracket. Even an early divorce had not lessened her stature in the family hierarchy as her parents reacted kindly by saying that they hadn’t really liked the husband all that much. Aline, three years younger, was certainly no black s

The first time I touched a dead person, I was ten years old at my grandfather’s funeral. I stared at his profile because I was not tall enough to look down at his face. I noticed that the end of his nose turned slightly downward. My Aunt Thelma set a chair next to the casket. She helped me kneel on the seat of the chair for a better view.             I looked. It was Grampa for sure. As I turned to descend from the chair, Aunt Thelma said, “Carol, would you like to kiss Gramp