The Late Arrival

In the few years under my belt as a hack writer, I’ve read a lot of posts from a lot of other bloggers, hoping to pick up on the things that make a piece great or gripping. This nonprofessional research has turned up one thing: honesty. Honesty, as in Are-you-sure-you-wanna-say-that-out-loud honesty. Yeah. That. The great pieces have always been from writers who speak from their hearts and say things that are ironically funny, sometimes painful, but always glaringly, transparently, and sometimes embarrassingly, true.   Bare. Truth. Transparency. That takes courage akin to walking on a frozen pond during the spring thaw.  Think about it: we’ve all got stories that could make us great writers – even the hacks like me, but it’s all a question of courage: what are we willing to share? Are we willing to bare some uncomfortable things?   In my case, it’s missing my mom. Oh, the coward in me will casually refer to losing her at a young age and wax philosophic a...

The rush of cold air and sticky summer heat created a thick fog as I opened the freezer door. It was someplace in the back. Forgotten and alone, but still usable: the whole chicken I planned on making for supper. At a few months shy of turning twenty, this would be my first attempt making a “mom dinner” for the family since my mom’s death a few months back. She’d buy whole chickens – fryers – because they were cheap. This last lone fryer, a rock hard frozen bird, was one of her last purchases and my inheritance. I threw it in the sink and covered it in tepid water to defrost. Some hours later, as I cut away the now defrosted chicken’s shrink-wrapped plastic shroud and gave it an icy cold kitchen faucet shower, I could feel something shaking around inside the cavity. Instantly, my mind’s eye pictured mom’s hands going inside the thing and pulling out tiny, mushy flesh-colored baggies before cutting up the bird for frying. With chin lifted skyward and mouth corners turned down, I...