short for daughter—it was the best they could do. Dad raised horses near the Sweetwater, selling to miners. February 1st, three feet of snow and the cabin burned down, though the lucky barn was saved. The day I was born, Father bedded Mother in the stallion’s stall, moving Old Bud in with a mare. Mother…
In the late winter of 1985, John Rogan had been a surgeon for almost thirty-five years, and though still active and vital, a tall, erect, white-haired man, with a reputation for audacity matched by success, he was thinking of retiring. His older brother, also a surgeon, had apparently committed suicide the year before. He had…
Hasn’t everyone lived in an invisible And essentially unreal, imaginary city With beautiful empty buildings on byways Or sewers called canals filled with Slopping water and huge coffins offering Pronged upright musical clefs to the air As the whole load staggers nobly Toward the extraordinary, and maybe Venice Was named for Venus, the gondola For…
July 1878 Even sage hens were panting. Belle Bishop and I dangled our feet in a cooling bucket of well water while sewing clothes for our corn husk dolls. On the horizon, particles like a fine snow blew across washboard sand and platinum wheat grass. Sheep stampede, I said. And Belle said, Corn silk does…
The Andersons’ house perched on the corner of our block like a dinosaur, with wings and a tail that spread into the lot behind it, growing in sections as the family increased. Mrs. Anderson had five children by her first husband, who died in bed of a heart attack the morning of their tenth anniversary….
It’s not a nice thing. Not a nice idea. Or it might be a nice idea. Who knows? King Kong. Mighty Joe Young. Cheetah. But it’s not nice, not really. Living with monkeys is not pretty. Beside the quart of chocolate milk (which had to be divided equally, my brothers and sister slowly measuring), live…
stood across the dusty street from Sam’s Shade Tree Saloon. Once, during a holdup, bullets whizzed through the door past the trimmer’s chair where Mama sat not five minutes before. That was the year of the flood, when we had to pile hat trimmings on high shelves and escape with our lives and Mama’s wool…
‘Yde’s the name. Edward ‘yde . . . or Hyde, as educated folk like yourself would have it. That’s my real name, although for the past fifty years, Hyde has stayed hidden under the moniker of Edward Layman. To the good people here in the West Midlands, I’m just Layman or Ed, no different from…
the Old Country where the children we were walk around in black and white movies, long nights with bugs flying in my window, dreams slippery as wet fish, moans in the air from our parents’ room? Horses kicked at their stalls, heat shivered in the summer skies. Sleepless we held our breath, saw shadows come…
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