In Memory of Natalie Portman the Chicken, a Rooster — Some stories need exaggeration to make them interesting. This one doesn't. Every word is true. The Human Babies My friend Kelly and I were pregnant at the same time. Our babies grew to be soybean-sized, then avocado-sized, and then spaghetti squash-sized. We had the same due date and figured our babies would be…

Most people have never even heard of it. — Your heart is a muscle in the center of your chest. It pumps blood through tubes that travel to all parts of your body. Inside your heart is a small, teardrop-shaped bone. Most people don’t know about this bone. The students in my high school biology class had never heard…

Adventures with weird birds — I was at this art gallery on Cape Cod and there were these huge black and white images of feathers. They were printed on this creamy-textured paper that you just wanted to rub between your fingers. I was very pregnant and the skin on my feet was pulled so taut…

Tap tap tap…I think you’re going to be ok. I share my office with about a dozen Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches. They live in a small glass tank between my Bluetooth speaker and a box of K-cups. As far as officemates go, they’re not that bad. They don’t heat weird foods…

And you should eat a banana — I felt like a god yesterday when I put a new double-A battery in the clock on my wall. For a few days, the second hand had been struggling to make it up past the number seven. It climbed a few tick marks and then fell, shuddering back down to…

Oh hey! My name is Emily and I go by she/her pronouns! I was wrapping up a meeting last week when my friend Charlotte tossed in this whingdinger: “So what’s the deal with all these pronoun changes, anyway?!?” Charlotte is great. She’s in her 60's and has worked in the…

I guess we’re all just saps with apps these days. The wheels of my car came to a dead stop in the middle of the road. My foot was nowhere near the brake, but I was driving into a blinding snowstorm and there were knee-high drifts of snow swirled across…

Two poems about fat and some thoughts about my face — For years, our family has passed around this little green tube of creamy yellow paste in the wintertime. It’s bigger than a chapstick, but still small enough to fit in a pocket. It has a mild vanilla smell and it starts out hard, but it softens and spreads the second…

Helmets are optional — especially for douchebags. My daughter is ten. She wears purple ski pants with pink and black paint splatters on them. Her ski helmet is white with a big pink dot on the top like something from a candy shop. She’ll tell you she’s a hardcore skier…