Then out of the darkness leapt a bare hand that stroked my brow, “Come along, child; stretch out your feet under the blanket. Darkness will give you back, unremembering. Do not be afraid.” So I put down my book and pushed like a finger through sheer silk, the autobiographical part of me, the am, snatched…
is one of the greatest mysteries of nature. * Every day a pressure rises, brutalities brew; the pure in spirit are tried as they accommodate the mechanical demands of the physical, repetitive world. Repetition for Divinity is myth; repetition for mortals is labor. “Row, row, row your boat.” * The mock-Homeric and the beautiful Alexandrian…
from House of Widows Like most men under the right circumstances, my father could walk on water. In fact, he did it often, and sometimes he took me along. Together we stood on the frozen whitecaps of Cape Ann looking back at the lights of our town on the Massachusetts north shore. Even half a…
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…
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