Allow me to run from America and, if it be Your will, / Have Germans roll out their welcome mats / As America opened her arms to my parents / When they escaped Berlin in the ’30s.

Don didn’t care if it would storm. They were here to fish, he and his son, and they needed a break in their luck. Yesterday was merciless, snags and empty stringers. The other fishermen, however, caught more Walleye than they bothered to count.

"Draw me a mermaid, Mommy." “Okay,” I answer my two-year old daughter. She watches me outline the figure in pencil on pink construction paper. The mermaid turns out to be feminine, unashamed of her bare breasts, and ready to swim in a dangerous ocean. I envy her.

stay kin stay kin stay kin stay kin / stay kinder to myself stay kinder to myself stay kind stay alive / I want to stay kind I want to stay alive I want to stay kind I want to stay alive I want to / stay alive stay kind stay be alive be kinder to myself be kinder to myself

This is not Minoo’s first visit to the Caspian seashore. She has been here one other time, when she was a child of nine or ten. During that trip, she went with her mother to the women’s part of the beach, and they went into the sea together.

What did she have to be so boisterous about, I thought, furiously. She was fat and out of control, and it was easy to make fun of her. I wrote a mocking modern tale about a loud-mouthed woman in Los Angeles who sold real estate, like my mother did at the time. I got a good grade, and I proudly shared it with her. God forgive me.