Bread and Bread

No make-up Rainbow Brite glasses selfie as temporary author photo  I've never fully understood the phrase "No news is good news." I think it means that if you haven't gotten any updates, things are probably proceeding as planned. I was raised to believe in plans and routine and the supremacy of consistency.  But at some point—maybe when I was 14 and didn't see my name on the list of girls chosen for drill team, posted at the entrance to the locker room, maybe when I got my first negative pregnancy test—I started to feel like "All news is bad news." It's silly, because I've actually gotten a lot more good news than bad news in my life, yet every time I'm waiting to hear back about something, even when the possible outcomes are only "good" and "neutral," my stomach twists and the apocalypse twinkles on the horizon.  I wrote a book about my annoying brain's apocalyptic flirtations, and about some other things: wanting a b...

As an oversized kitten, he chomped the hand of a friend, and we said, I'm sorry, he's still figuring out what kind of cat he wants to be.  Which is to say: he is not a metaphor any more than he's a bad omen flitting blackly across someone's path, but I must tell you this— A year ago a new cat moved in; we brought her here, I held the door  for the invading army, and she marched in On short legs, waving her tortoiseshell tail, purring and rolling for the humans,  but chasing him down like a tiger He scaled the nearest fence, a big brother witnessing the horror of an infant, and disappeared, but he never bit or clawed her. He's figured out what kind of cat he wants to be. We don't see him in the sunlight anymore, and this is my great failure, among many. My mother birthed my sister because she loved having one child so much, she thought why not two; she ruined my life and created my best friend. It only took us twenty years to retract our claws. When I say this ha...