Thousands of tiny fists tamping the surface of the lake flowing like a wide river gone crazy, southeast, westnorth letting the wind push it around in its bed and the boat hull hugging the shore. What else can she do? Even the trees agree, shaking their crowns, throwing down their leaves as if she were…
Half of us were enrolled in the Army. Half of us were not. Half of us watched for thieves in the factories and were given no sleep. Half recited the day’s events into machines equipped with sensitive needles. Half never stopped training, and buried dried food at spots marked in red on maps. The songs…
While he was the governor of Leeds Prison, my uncle Bourke was late for breakfast twice. Usually he’d finished eating by quarter past eight, and by eight-thirty he was walking down the avenue of horse chestnuts which led from our front door to the main road; there he caught the No. 16 Wingate tram to…
The summer I was six, my parents rented an old gray-shingled house surrounded by tall hedges on a foggy, dissolving spur of Massachusetts shoreline, a house I still consider my most indelible home. We stayed there just three months, long enough for me to grow a quarter inch and to need new sneakers. One of…
That morning—a humid morning, early Spring, gray birds feeding on muddy lawns, the sound of a chain saw nearby, a red shirt tied to a battered tree, the empty smoke-streaked sky— That morning they held him in the green car and negotiated his punishment. They blindfolded him. His hand was held to something very hot…
My sister and I step briskly out of the greengrocer to get away from the men behind us in line who have told us, in great detail, what they’d like to do to us, where they intend to put certain parts of their bodies. The clerk, kindly, rings their purchases up slowly, so Cyndy and…
y wife and I are waiting for children. Every morning for three months, Joan’s alarm goes off at seven-even if she hasn’t climbed into bed until four or five-and she gropes the night table in the dark for her basal thermometer, slips it under her tongue, hits the snooze bar on her clock…
You took the room in the attic. Watched television by yourself. I used to walk down the dim stairs to the basement to be with you at night, to listen to stories of plantations and dictatorships as you folded with precise care the underpants of my family. You who knew our human stains: faint arrowheads…
The other day I was wondering how to make onion soup, and my mind served up the bowl I had in Seattle just before we shipped out to Yokohama-my first onion soup, with a slice of toasted french bread and some melted Gruyere cheese. This was the end of 1946. I was six and a…
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