AuthorJenn Frank

The two scariest things my mother ever said to me were ‘I thought you would have a family by now’ and ‘that little dog will be yours someday.’ Most days, if I’m working, I ignore my mother’s dog. If she’s really feeling neglected, she will stretch to her full height, which isn’t much, and push against me, her forepaws in the small of my back. At night, when I sleep on the couch — it’s always on a couch — she will sleep too, a warm gray curl fitted in the crook behind my knees. At night, if I’m working — I’m always working — she will pretend to be asleep but never close her eyes. Sometimes I will turn to my mother’s dog and whisper, “Hey, do you wanna…” just to see her sit up and tremble. She is waiting to hear how the sentence ends. “Don’t tease Tootsie!” my mother will chastise, loud in my mind’s ear. “All right, all right,” I will grumble at no one. “Toots, do you wanna go for a walk.” My mother’s dog is a miniature schnauzer, a stocky little thing made of perfect right angles and...

The words “do not resuscitate” imply crucial treatment is somehow being withheld; “allow natural death,” conversely, suggests that something is being given. Exactly six years ago I bought a Nintendo Wii – came home from Toys “R” Us, plugged it in. (The box is still there on the floor of my girlhood bedroom, right where I left it in another November.) “Can you imagine, Al?” my mother asked my father. “In our lifetime?” She was standing around marveling as I – ahem – went bowling. Then I saw the Wii’s “pacemaker” warning and now I was pushing my adoptive dad out of the room. “Out, out!” I commanded him. I was not going to be the one to murder my father, thank you. I played videogames exactly because I wasn’t permitted to and I reviewed them for money simply to irritate my mother further. If you have a streak of impishness running through you, there is no better motivator than having someone in your life telling you what you cannot do. It wasn’t until that February column, the one about...

I keep having this weird dream. I’m on a rocket ship in outer space. Sometimes I’m strapped into a seat, but often I’m in free-fall. Often there are other people on the rocket ship, but sometimes I’m alone. Sometimes the rocket ship isn’t floating through space. Sometimes, instead, it’s on fire and trembling – it is reentering Earth’s atmosphere, presumably because of a mechanical failure. Sometimes it isn’t a rocket ship at all: sometimes it is an airplane that is crashing. A few times I’ve found myself inside a flooded submarine. Sometimes it’s an elevator wheezing toward the top of a swaying building. In some versions of that dream the wires snap, and everyone in the elevator plunges toward the bottom floor. Sometimes we hold hands. I know these don’t sound like the same dream scenario repeating itself, but I also know they are, because the same feelings of tremendous emptiness – of very lonely terror – color all of them. My dreams are themed. I have another recurring nightmare...