It was several months until we discovered the damage it had wrought.

My mom slaps down some more dough in front of me. To eat, you must create.

Slick gray flesh. Slippery yellow flesh. Powdery white flesh. Three generations, one shrimp.

"Green, they'd be green, just how my own grandpa used to have 'em," he sighs.

As we approach the river, the sight between its two bridges is my worst nightmare.

With plates of food in hand, you are forced to greet vaguely familiar faces.

"Bye," she says. "Love you!" 

I freeze, almost tripping down the steps. 

My dad and I have come to the mutual realisation that he can't force me to help him out in the garden. 

Their shells pricked my fingers, the spikes digging tauntingly into my skin. 

The children call it "Reverend Father" because the flock of white feathers at its neck seems like the collar on a priest's black cloak. 

I don't even know if our sweet little lilac, right in the corner of the garden, still blooms in summer. 

A falling star taught her how to wish, but a falling star apple trunk taught her something else. 

It was the boys' table at lunch. They were all in my grade, some of them my friends. 

There is a certain inscrutability in the mercurial ebb and flow of life in the woods, an unassuming cadence that settles just beyond my naive circumspection. The dry sweep of the wind’s touch is fond and insidious in turns . . .

You always liked to watch the trains as they passed by, one after another, right on schedule. You liked the whooshing sound of the breaks as the train slowed into the station, and the whirring of the engine as it started up again.

There's a sort of spell that falls over the dinner table as we wait for the athan to sound.

I grew up eating an excessive amount of eggs. Actually, that’s a little misleading.

“Black people don’t eat sushi.” He said it while I was in the middle of filling a bowl with grits . .

There’s a moment in kindergarten when I realize that the other grandparents don’t smile.

My teacher, Ms. Waterson, wore glasses, and I kept an earnest gaze on them as I spoke . . .

When Uchechi’s voice crackles with laughter and her almond brown eyes crease . . .

My mom got me a goldfish. I didn't even want it. She told me it'd teach me diligence. 

We act like we're pleasantly thrust together instead of a family bound by grief and love. 

My mother came into the kitchen with a blank face. "We're leaving," she said. "We're going to move in with Ahmad in New York." 

Throughout my many travels, to all sorts of exotic lands, never before have I seen a diet so extraordinary as that of the snamuh.

Of all the swimmer summer and the dust, sun, rain, you are what sticks out. 

As a child, my relationship with my dad was very straightforward. I'd ask him for something and he'd say "yes" or "no." 

I am coming of age in a world that doesn't make sense to me. I will turn eighteen quietly, without a party, without my extended family. 

When my mother and father had left for the west, they brought few things with them. 

The embassy called and approved our request to leave the country. So we packed our clothes and a couple of other essentials, leaving the rest behind.