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  • Still Life on Brick Steps

    My brother and I without coats on the front porch waved goodbye, the day our father left, with hands held low, close to our chests, so our mother behind us at the window couldn’t see. She stayed inside, and when his car took the corner, we turned and saw her—the curtains, long and white, parted…

  • Holding the Mare

    When we undressed in the tack room, we kept our backs turned, cradled our new breasts like the barn cat’s kittens and counted ribbons strung like tiny laundry overhead: blue, red, yellow, white, pink, green. We giggled in the dark there over the school nurse’s diagram, the new words. But we all said yes, as…

  • About Lorrie Moore: A Profile

    Lorrie Moore hasn’t had a full night’s sleep in three and a half years. It’s not what you think, however. She has not, like one of her characters, fallen prey to love woes or obsessive-compulsive panic. If anything, Lorrie Moore is far tougher than most people would suspect. It’s simply that she has a feisty…

  • A ’49 Merc

        Someone dumped it here one night, locked the wheel and watched it tumble into goldenrod and tansy, ragweed grown over one door flung outward in disgust. They did a good job, too: fenders split, windshield veined with an intricate pattern of cracks and fretwork. They felt, perhaps, a rare satisfaction as the chassis crunched…

  • Making Sure the Tractor Works

    A drunk man reels his tractor around the square lawn, midnight. His wife stares from the front door window as if on a half-sunk ship’s deck at a shark tearing through the dark water. She chews her thumbnail raw. Two of their sons, in blue pajamas, shuffle across the linoleum rubbing their eyes. She plays…

  • Gray

    She stood in the street, perplexed, as if she had just been dropped there. This was the late 1900’s in a Western European city much like any other, when the streets at lunch hour teemed with office slaves, like herself, with their sandwiches slightly wet from sitting in ice all morning, and most of each…

  • Remote

    How far, how far would it seem, ahead of the body? Remote takes its time, taciturn. Spool and furl, hope’s quick unravel—remote: a royal worth of dead watches. Replaced hour, single shade, the white-put-there, polite winter, strange chance. Remote turns pale and sends us away to the next abstracted space where Remote’s relatives live in…