Up or down it, disguise and discretion go both ways. Indifferent to tone, peeling paint adds cachet: patina proudly worn as uniform. Varnish sweats like skin in the stair. Concierge behind lace curtains waits for deliverance. Who cares if care has stained her age? Even spring is autumnal: pallor of sun and leaf on café…
Whenever she met someone, she secretly analyzed their handwriting. She wondered if these insights were illicitly gained, like wiretapping, but reasoned that graphology was merely close attention to the person without the distraction of interaction. Each element of the psyche had its equivalent mark on paper: the dominant upper zone of one friend indicated spirituality,…
There is nothing more than a painted room and I, a painted woman in it by an open window, a brass sun and a blob of flowers on a cabinet. Crowds come in every day to look at the bold brass color of the sun, the window quite unlike any other; the cabinet with flowers….
i. In the year that Johann Pike turned seventy he had been the Executive Director of the Chicago Antiquarian Society for over thirty years. His offices were housed, along with the rest of the Society, in Blackthorne Hall, which was located six blocks from the center of the University of Chicago, where Johann’s father had…
All summer and fall the couple floats hand in hand from work at the shelter workshop. Hand in hand in their secondhand sleeveless oxford shirts. With target tattoos on their deltoids. Even in the winter, the same way, hand in hand, although bundled up in secondhand wool coats. One snowy evening, right after they pass…
MASTHEAD Guest Editor Cornelius Eady Editor Don Lee Poetry Editor David Daniel Assistant Editor Gregg Rosenblum Associate Fiction Editor Maryanne O'Hara Associate Poetry Editor Susan Conley Founding Editor DeWitt Henry Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Assistant Fiction Editors: Jay Baron Nicorvo and Nicole Kelley. Editorial Assistants: Megan Weireter and Aja DeKleva Cohen. Poetry Readers: Simeon Berry,…
Perhaps it is so much transatlantic travel that has made Margot Livesey into an expert literary smuggler. In person, Livesey, born in Perth, Scotland, in 1953, and now living near Boston, is charming and agreeable. The same could be said, at first glance, for her fiction. Livesey’s writing is eminently readable. You scarcely notice as…
Postcard from New York February 2002 It’s a different city now, this New York, the city my wife and I love (and choose) to live in, a new shorthand can be heard for time and location: “The Event,” “The 11th,” “The Pile.” For weeks after, on the way to rehearsals for a play of mine…
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