Excerpt from: “Some Kind of Happy Life”

There was one house where objects lost their space in the world and disappeared. The objects could be anything: a shoe, a French schoolbook, a dinner plate left unattended, a phone cord, a pen. They were always ordinary objects, and always, at the point when they were discovered missing, absolute necessities.

The house made us suspicious. We became irrational, hoarding clothes, counting the loose change in our wallets. When we left the house, even if just to the supermarket, we carried anything we thought we couldn’t live without. Inside our bags and backpacks at any given moment could be a stapler, a favorite bra, a set of colored markers, five books, a green sweater, a mix tape.

Guests to the house suspected none of this. They’d leave a coat in the hall closet and expect it to be there when they were ready to leave. When the coat was gone, they’d wait for someone to retrieve it. They wouldn’t trust us when we came up empty-handed, would search the closet themselves–behind the vacuum cleaner, separating every hanger, pulling out the old scarves and mittens from the top shelf. They wouldn’t think to leave the house without their coat. They didn’t realize this could take years.

(2007, The Portland Review)