Because nights on the third shift seem to stretch longer than they should, and because sleeping through the day has been giving him nightmares, Jimmy Barnes buys coffee at the truck stop on Sugar Hill Road. He circles the place once before parking. In the big lot out back, the tractor-trailers are lined in rows,…
Passing the pears over the electronic scanner, she says These are beautiful. Look at the markings! And: I don’t know the story of where they’re from. But I believe they are just right. And passing the figs: So complex, what’s on the inside. Everything worthwhile has a kind of mystery. I don’t bother with it…
A space to rise in, made from what falls, from the very mass it’s cleared from, cut, carved, chiseled, fluted or curved into a space there is no end to at night when the stained glass behind the altar could be stone too, obsidian, or basalt, for all the light there is. At night,…
We constructed a sign and planted it in the park in the center of town. Future Site of the First National Bank of the Grand Duchy of New Brunswick. As best as anyone could remember, Stephen came up with the idea itself. Lisa added “New Brunswick.” Donna contributed “Grand Duchy.” She’d read it in the…
Anger doesn’t catch the light like laughter, but with my friend it seems to crowd him, seems to complicate his neck and jaw. It’s not just that. It’s made him fat. We’ve only walked two blocks and he’s wheezing when we reach Walgreens. A wind-fixed scent of diesel passes. I hate my job, he says,…
1 I was hired to finish interiors in Cloverdale but I didn’t know how: how to pry open the zinc-tabbed five-gallon tub: how to slide out the balsa paddle without leaving a maze of white dots on oak parquet: how deep and long to dip the bristle: perhaps it was a problem of language: paint…
As if hallucinations made of words could hallucinate themselves beyond the words, out of the books, out of the newest on display behind the window, and the ones on tables in the gloom or ranged on shelves in different sections; out of the pages building to betrayal, out of the spectral signatures of doom of…
“Reading Jim Shepard,” says Michael Chabon, “is like encountering our national literature in microcosm.” This is true, though there’s nothing (merely) national about it. In an oeuvre that now includes six novels (Flights, Paper Doll, Lights Out in the Reptile House, Kiss of the Wolf, Nosferatu, Project X), three story collections (Batting Against Castro, Love…
In the scene where the cow jumps over the moon the little dog laughs with his mouth wide open. Comforted by the same thirty words he’s heard fifty times the boy leans sideways into his mother. Before this they’d walked by the water. Before that they’d spread their blanket on the grassy bank, and before…
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