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Most surprising of all were your hands; they never carried a fleck of dirt or dust. Your fingernails might have been painted by da Vinci, and when you curled your hand around a cup, your index finger protruded over the top like a blue heron down on her fishing-luck, but still wavering there over the liquid.

Today when I get the mail, I see my neighbor Zach who was training the father of a little boy who fell to his death from the balcony the day before Easter. Zach, in perfect shape. Zach, the personal trainer who everyone in the condo seems to have a crush on. Today his smile was small, his eyes exhausted. My mouth was hidden under my mask.  I sit with the family, he says, but I don’t know what else to do.

The statistics all wash away, and it’s suddenly just that one child, his family, their grief. Zach tells me if I pray that I might want to know the little boy’s name was Jesse. My mother’s name is Janet.

Cook even when the dishes are piling. Cook; the food will be ready before UberEats gets there. Cook because of taxes. Cook to keep family recipes. Cook to have leftovers, so you don’t cook tomorrow. Cook so there’s no MSG. Cook for vegetables. Cook for your son. Cook for yourself, so you can stop feeling guilty for spending money, for gaining weight, for ordering dessert with every meal. Cook jerk chicken with rub; garlic cloves, scotch bonnets, allspice berries, dried thyme, grated nutmeg, soy sauce, vegetable oil. Cook jerk chicken because it’s your son’s favorite dish. Cook jerk chicken; it goes with white rice, rice and peas, broiled potatoes, blanched broccolis, oven-baked zucchini fries, mac and cheese. Cook jerk chicken because a whole chicken will last three days before you have to cook again.

How can I explain this flightlessness? You’re in my air, I whisper back too late and turn away.

From the stem he pulled one—plucked, she thought, thinking of the better word. Not purple, but almost purple, as if fog had stuck to its skin

I  am  weary  of  my  own  death,  its  flagrant  hospitality,  the  stone  mug  in  which  it proffers the best cocoa. Photographs of obscure ancestors line its mantelpiece; bits of cut glass litter death’s settee. I have come here to exchange doves with my death, and already I am sick to the spleen of death, of doves.

There were bones everywhere, in the ground, resting on the surface, wedged in the crevices of trees, human bones, animal bones, bones of unimaginable beings, strange bones. So that could be the jawbone of an angel, you said: the spleen-bone, the miter-bone.

If you’re like me, you sewed and twisted your own bows onto that winter’s blue spruce, heated oil on the stovetop for popcorn and before it cooled began with thread to bind the pieces together into a single strand of yellow-white light. If there is a shade you can hear, that you are continually drawn to as you remember, it is this color yellow: the yellow that a test subject in an experiment on synesthesia once described as visually embodying both minor and augmented chords, their currents of foreboding and astonishment.

This catbird, inches outside, in full view to me, but hidden in the holly from another perspective, keeps darting from phrase to phrase until its stream of unconsciousness brings my mother to mind

sucking into themselves like I shied inward when asked, How is your father?