Choosing Daddy

by Greta Gaard

"Butterfly!" Flora yells, dashing toward me in her best toddler version of Charlie Chaplin's rocking gait, carrying a clear tube with a cork at one end. She shows me the tube, which contains both a butterfly and what looks like a wasp. "Butterfly!"

A Tree House of Her Own

by Kelli Russell Agodon

This morning my husband went on the Internet and printed out detailed plans for building a tree house. There was a quick discussion on cost--I heard "about four hundred dollars"--but what concerned me most was that the tree house would be finished, not left incomplete in our backyard as a visual sign to the world: "The Agodons Do Not Finish Projects." An in-progress kayak has remained hidden for seven years in our basement; the washing machine covers a half-finished floor in the laundry room; and in the bathroom a strategically-placed toothbrush holder conceals missing wall tiles. But the tree house will be one of the first things you see as you open the garden gate and walk to our front door. If it isn't completed, it will be the oversized and un-finished welcome wagon we'll be rationalizing to guests for years to come.

Pendulum

by Teryl Faulkner

"Nothing can make me stop drinking," my father told my mother the day my brother was born.

Twelve years later, a first and last family meeting is called. My mother and father stand in front of the couch, each at opposite ends of the coffee table. She appears agitated and reluctant, as though summoning the courage to leap into a freshly thawed lake; he, the slightest bit eager.

"I'll only be gone for awhile," my father promises. "I'll be back."

Car keys loose in his mechanic's hand, he leaves the house as a sigh does the lungs. Through the window, the three of us watch the night's big snowflakes settle about his hair. The Cadillac swallows his down-filled bomber and, in melodramatic slow motion, my father drifts away.