I sometimes encounter ex–baseball fans (invariably middle-aged men) who tell me they have given up following the sport because of the steroid scandal, the huge salaries of the players, the duplicity of the owners—“It’s all become just a big business,” or some such explanation, which they deliver in a tone of principled disgust. I listen…
excerpts from a memoir in progress Near the end of your cremation, when your blood and eyeballs, skin and muscle, organ meat and marrow have vaporized up the smokestack into the wind above this river-hugging corridor populated by machine shops and body shops, an adult bookstore called Fantasy Island with a cartoon palm tree on…
Fourteen days patrol, the Colonel had ordered, but the men had already sold most of their ammunition on the Mandalay black market and had no intention of fighting even if they hadn’t, so they headed into the hills instead. Think of it as a camping trip, Mya Aung suggested to the others. * They crossed…
I thought I’d grow up to be a scientist. As a child I was infatuated with pet mice and guppies and studying trees from the shapes of their leaves. And don’t I remember, as a kindergartner, being ushered into the school basement to watch on TV the Russian satellite, Sputnik, soaring into outer space? We…
John C. Zacharis Award Ploughshares is pleased to present Christine Sneed with the twenty-first annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her short story collection, Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010). The $1,500 award, which is named after Emerson College’s former president, honors the best…
The hurricane’s advance team of breezes administers a poll to my oak trees. The author, having scented disaster, having been awake for hours, advises his trees not to answer. Telephones trill on nightstands, requiring weary authorities to sit on the edges of their beds with their heads in their hands as instructed by disaster movies….
I’m dumb about the world. To me, it always looks haunted, impoverished—especially in snow, which returns it to black and white. And sometimes I look and see nothing— but the elementary smoke rising from a human village, overpopulated, and yet undermade. A woman from there is walking along the side of the road to the next village…
Grizzly bears, electric bears, fire bears—these three are the most dangerous bears, my three-year-old daughter informs me. I don’t know how she knows what she knows, yet she knows many things. Lately it is all about bears. Electric bears? I ask her. I’ve never seen an electric bear. If you go into his cave, he…
Torchlight splinters in a crystal chandelier. Rebels have taken the palace. Yet, your mind sleeps safely in its skull. But, Sigmund Freud sets a fly in it. “We are made such that we can derive intense enjoyment only from contrast and little from a state of things.” Though the poli-sci major says that’s just one…
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