Rosemary Harp

We aren’t really widows. We just wish we were. We discuss our fantasy widowhoods philosophically. We are especially interested in the aesthetics of widowhood, the style it can take. Would we be, we ask each other, a Jackie: coiffed and determined in a sleek sheath dress and big sunglasses to hide the tears, with a grief-stricken and prematurely stately child at each hand?… Keep Reading

Unexpected items I’ve found in used bookstores: a sales receipt for chocolate pudding and cigarettes stuck at precisely the midway point of Eat, Pray, Love… Keep Reading.

Gwen was gone again. She claimed she was painting on the beach, but it had started to rain. I knew she was on the phone with Bella. When I say on the phone I mean texting, or maybe facetiming, which always makes me think of two-timing. People Bella’s age can’t just put the phone to their ear and listen… Keep Reading.

The ceiling is white, the walls are white, the curtains are white. They swell and recede in unison like lungs. On the breeze, Mina can smell frangipani and chlorine. She is pinned to the sofa beneath her brother Hansie. The fabric of his rugby shorts rasps against her bare leg…

Tess Chen is in high demand as a pet sitter around Arriba Circle. She can be trusted with feeding schedules and keys. She does not snoop or help herself to popsicles. Since summer vacation began, she has looked after a middle-aged cat, a clutch of frantic and incestuous hamsters, and Jorie Wexler’s black and yellow ball python… Read more.

When my oldest son was six months old, the teacher at baby music class scolded me in front of the group for speaking to him in my usual voice… Keep Reading.

When Dermot asked me how I could have risked missing our daughter’s tenth birthday party to spend time with my gay ex-boyfriend, I told him he had to understand that there’d been a legitimate emergency. What I didn’t tell Dermot was that performing acts of self-negation for Theo was a kind of muscle memory I didn’t always know how to override. I didn’t taxonomize the kinds of love or explain to Dermot that ours is the combing lice out of the whole family’s hair together at 1:00 a.m. when someone wakes up itchy kind of love—and that’s the best kind… Keep reading.

When I was growing up, we had a ginger cat who deposited dead mice and birds on the back porch each morning and preened beside his kills. My mother would pull on her green rubber gardening gloves and discard the little corpses without squeamishness or sentiment. When the cat was fourteen and my mother was forty-five, my father left her… Keep reading.

At age ten, Gertrude received a marriage proposal from a duke, but stamped her foot, cursed him with a terrifying oath, and declared she would have no spouse but the Lord. To protect her from violent abductors who sought to destroy Gertrude’s innocence, her father shaved her head, leaving only a ring of hair like a crown… Keep reading.