Diane holds the map in her hands and turns it counterclockwise. She notices how awful her dry, broken thumbnails look, and she tilts the palms of her hands upward to conceal them. "This is the park where we were dropped off, so I think we are here somewhere." Diane taps Zhonglu Road with her index…
Everybody has their mean days. You live in a light blue turtleneck, park dirt, roller skate patch, little monkey in a shirt. The busted-up driveway. Triumphant soap music from the window and there down the road a bowlegged grandpa who wants to help with your project. You sit on the tailgate and watch, bored, poking…
At the very northern edge of the Soviet Union, just west of the Kara Sea, there’s a city called Dickson, which is exactly the spot I used to focus on on the map on my bedroom wall when I was trying to fall asleep. By the time I was twelve the map had been moved…
It turned out there was another mother at my son’s nursery school whose father had killed himself. I learned this when I came back to Boston, ten days after my father died. I dropped my son off at the school and watched as he darted off, quick as a released minnow, into the space that…
The stick the dog drags writes a poem in the snow along the railroad tracks. Is it my life she’s writing in a long, slow cursive already half-buried by fresh snow? There, written in a winter forest, lies my story, for anyone to read.
Clare can’t walk. She has sprained her ankle so badly, it’s no better than broken. Marble step, wet leaf, a moment of distraction, and she was pulled up, several feet above the landing and dropped like a bag of laundry, her fingers sliding down the wet iron banister, her feet bending and flopping like…
What makes a good story? Could the question be asked, What makes a story good? There are nine answers. Here’s one. One summer many years ago, I was in the mountains of Utah installing a catch-basin water system for a remote cabin. My dear friend George had a blue backhoe on a trailer which had…
De Español y de India Produce Mestizo —after a series of Casta paintings by Juan Rodríguez Juárez, ca. 1715 The canvas is a leaden sky behind them, heavy with words, gold letters inscribing an equation of blood— this plus this equals this—as if a contract with nature, or a museum label, …
At fifty-eight, Ron Carlson is gray-haired, large-boned, one of those men who at six-foot-something is big without being imposing. He could pass for a park ranger at the Grand Canyon, or your local TV anchor, or maybe a third-base coach in the majors, and he seems solid and grounded in ways that go with those…
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