The old woman drowsed beneath an overhang of Orphan Annie hair. The blast of orange swirls and curlicues was blinding in the sun. Monsoon wondered how the old lady could sleep with all that brightness in her face. His backside was going numb against the pavement. Blinking, he scooched sideways for an up-close look at…
The summer I was fourteen, I went to stay in a small house in Connecticut with my grandmother and grandfather. My mother sent me there, she told me years later, because I was driving her crazy, coming home late, shirking my chores, smoking my father’s cigarettes. She wanted me out of the house, she said,…
After he left, even the topography shifted. Overnight our seaside resort became winter dusk in Detroit. Tall buildings stared me down, and like rush hour denizens pressed their gray bodies against mine. Their shadows quivered in my windows and coffee cups and tasted of secondhand smoke. Like me, they were all insomniacs. One corporate center…
By folding his legs so that his feet touched his thighs, Matt was able to completely immerse himself in hot water-water he had paid for shilling by shilling, dropping small English coins into a rusted metal box one by one to keep the water flowing until the bathtub was full. The tiny washroom was freezing…
Traveling alone, Martin Grant came to a place on the coast in the rain. A place much as he had imagined-green and balmy, with bright splashes of winter flowers and fruit trees and tall palms that rustled in the wind. A place so far from the frozen cornfields of central Iowa that it made him…
There was this cock in high school, not that I had anything to do with it but we girls talked a lot, giggled, how it had a job to do and was often seen rising behind its spandex suit at the country club. It worked pretty good, we figured, but there was this one girl…
In one of his essays, Gary Soto writes that as a child, he had imagined he would “marry Mexican poor, work Mexican hours, and in the end die a Mexican death, broke and in despair.” The statement might seem surprising, coming as it does from such a well-established writer. Considered one of the best Chicano…
A man walks into the gallery on a sunny afternoon carrying a fistful of golf clubs. I’m aware that there’s been some kind of traffic thing going on outside for the last few minutes, but I haven’t gone to the window to check it out-happens all the time around here. The softening silence of the…
Sacred day of rain, the crowds on Karol’s Bridge thin out, slightly repentant of their tourist ways, hunker down in pensions and hotels, to ponder the weird twists of language to be found in their brochures, or complain of the thinness of the towels, or of the pickpockets who speak the quick language of the…
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