On the Tye

Inside his disastrous apartment, exuberant files: Mousetraps; Buttons; Inkwells; Santa Claus Outfits; Fountains for Your Faucet. Old letters—“frankness in a man is an unusual thing but frankness in a woman as beautiful as you…” A bill for 26 years of unpaid dues from a New York gentleman’s club. Fifteen years after the Parkinson’s diagnosis—by then, crawling up and down stairs—he and my mother went tubing on the Tye River. He would remember it the rest of his life, he said 10 days before he died. His body anchored and buoyant, the sunlit water returning it to him.

 

Maud Casey is the author of two novels, The Shape of Things to Come and Genealogy, as well as a collection of stories, Drastic. She has received international fellowships from the Fundacion Valparaiso, the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers, and the Chateau de Lavigny, and is the recipient of the Italo Calvino Prize. She lives in Washington, D.C., and teaches at the University of Maryland and in the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson.

Photo credit: Red Bat

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