High up, in the towers of the public housing project, Laura Providencia and her mother, her brother, Angel, and her little sister, Rosita, lived under siege. In the elevator that smelled like a urinal, the junkies bobbed devotionally. The walls of the long hallways teemed with the exploding alphabet, the declamations, white, screaming, “Paco of…
It was a simple choice, the way she figured, and I still think she was right. Either she went willingly, ignoring everything still unsettled, or she could refuse and risk guilt for the rest of her life. So there really was no choice. She made a reservation, bought a suitcase, and headed for the airport….
I won’t tell you my name. I don’t know who you are; maybe you’d pass my name on, and there are many whom I fear now. I would love it if I had nothing to tell you. I have lost nearly everything-country, family, name-but I have retained my honor and gained a story, to my…
He lived with a pack of stray dogs up in the hills beyond Tibidabo. I went first to see the house shaped like a flower, a late unfinished work of the great Gaudí, and found the wild man, bearded, dressed for winter on a hot June afternoon in the dense pine forests: jackets over jackets,…
She was dozing on a faded Navajo blanket with the filmy shade of a maple tree drawn like a veil across her skin. Her blouse was still opened to where he’d unbuttoned it down to the sky blue of the bra she’d brought back as a souvenir from Italy. Martin was lying just beyond the…
When Gus sees his father, they don’t speak of it. His mother is dead. What was it that he did when he was ten? He remembers his father stripping him and hosing him down outside, and beating him with a peeled switch. Sent to his room without dinner, he grew up dreading the evening meal….
Before work I would stop by Constantine’s place for a glass of red wine and a cup of coffee. He kept the wine under the counter and poured it in secret into a large tumbler. “If anyone asks,” he once said, “tell them it’s the milk of a red cow.” You could tell which men…
More than a few people have assumed that Howard Norman is a Canadian writer. It’s no wonder, considering that most of his work — including his first two novels, The Northern Lights and The Bird Artist, both of which were nominated for the National Book Award — is set in Canada. In fact, Norman was…
What she is waiting for never arrives or arrives so slowly she can’t see it: like the river bluing silver and wearing minutely deeper into its channel, the flow hardens to carved stone as she fidgets beneath the whirling fan impatient for the train that rocks us above the water to…
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