For my mother’s fortieth birthday, my father brought home two coats-a Persian lamb and a karakul-and told her to choose between them. She set the boxes on the dining room table and opened the first. When she lifted the coat from the box, the tissue paper fluttered upward like a wing. She tried it on…
Not so long ago, in trying to dislodge a student from some writing that — due to her fear or complacency — was overly safe and conventional, I experimented with a bit of pedagogical brutishness. I looked her in the eye, held up her story, and said, ” I could have written this.” Now I…
On her deathbed, as she drew what were to be her last breaths on God’s green earth, the old woman made a confession so terrible to her husband that-even under circumstances as solemn and sorrowful as these-he could hardly take the secret as true, let alone forgive her for it. He listened by her side,…
It is men who carry the dead in our religion, but my sister and I are adamant and my mother accedes. Stepping over hillocks of soiled snow, my sister and I walk on opposite sides of the casket, borne also by nephews and uncles. The wood digs into my fingers, cuts grooves in the pillows…
At first when the captain’s voice came on over the intercom and made the announcement, she felt almost glad. Not gleeful exactly, but a sudden ching! of recognition coursed through her; events fell into place. She was glad she’d had her weekend at the hotel, glad for her swim in the hotel pool, for sleeping…
for Reynolds Price This morning in my bathroom mirror, I glimpsed the slope of my shoulders, my chest thinning to a hint of ribs, the hair of my pouching belly black and beaded with water, and pondering myself limp and priestly, laced with blue veins, I judged nothing threatening. Sometimes, I admit, I even…
When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed very hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces. The man who’d introduced them didn’t much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious…
The River I’ll admit I picked Ecuador for its symbolic possibilities. I wanted a place where things were reliable: twelve hours of darkness, twelve hours of light. It was the end of the old year, two weeks before my thirty-third birthday, the age my Catholic friend Tony said all things would be revealed to me….
Almost winter and the groundskeepers are firing blanks into the trees, scattering a nuisance of grackles from the branches— Enough, say the guns, enough of all your excrement and birdsong, and the very sight is futility: great fistfuls of black confetti, the way they soar out shrill with panic and return …
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