rolled through the city. Whoever has an answer won’t last. Traffic muscles through. Whole families lazing on steps eating grapes. “No I’m not,” says the youngest to her canary. “You grew into your legs, Tall One, didn’t you.” Then no one. Loosed papers flatten the fences. Bits of glass rest there and burn. This part…
This is a story about not doing; this is a story about everything else. The trouble with writing is that it’s too easy not to do. Imagine if eating chocolate was as easy not to do as writing. Or paying your mortgage. Or making an eight o’clock class. Imagine if you were firmly convinced that…
Kaufman drove from one fire to another. In Baltimore, there had been a train wreck in the Howard Street tunnel, the northern end of which was not far from the small house he owned, tucked away on a side street behind the hulking wreck of a Victorian hotel, and three doors down from a gay…
Marie parks in the circular drive where the front lawn had been grass the summer before. But nothing so beautiful, nothing so inherently good, about grass. The paving job was done by her cousin William’s own company, which he’d started after deciding it was too difficult to make a living as a fisherman. Hippie-ish…
Twenty-one once descript ranch-style houses built twenty years ago on a stretch of road that once led to a small-time chicken farm, fresh eggs. Each house dropped on two bare acres. Twenty-one tabula rasas that go wish wish wish wish if racing by with a car window down. No one has ever slammed on their…
Outside the white cottage, a half-dozen chairs set out. A run of rocky fields washed by starlight. Full moon rising off the cliffs cutting a path to the islands. Inside the cottage, the sounds of children quieting themselves. The slow scrape and rattle of chairs dragged across a linoleum floor. Last stir of footsteps fading…
As one opponent calling out checkmate an hour past midnight could crack a man already broken and bring allegations from his tongue, violence to his veins, bring him to rise and hip-knock the table so the legs screech, so the pieces quiver and topple, the bishop a salt shaker kissed by an elbow, bring him…
Learn to think like a horse her trainer said. She went into the pasture at noon, when her horses lay down to sleep without fear of coyotes, without fear. They sensed her but did not mind as she stretched out beside them with the June heat’s broad strong hand flattening her into the grass. Now,…
I escape. I board Northwest 18 to New York, via Tokyo. The engine starts, there is no going back. Yesterday, I taught the last English class and left my job of thirty-two years. Five weeks earlier, A-Ma died of heartbreak, within days of my father’s sudden death. He was ninety-five, she ninety. Unlike A-Ba, who…
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