Summers meant peeling: peaches, pears, July, all carved up. August was a tomato dropped in boiling water, my skin coming right off. And peas, Lord, after shelling all summer, if I never saw those green fingers again it would be too soon. We’d also make wine, gather up those peach scraps, put them in jars…
But did we not Mint our excuse to sin, And nurture it to our advantage? Now here, now there, Like drops on a pond Shot by the needlegun From the silt to the surface; now The mechanism of our thought Leaps in reverse Like that hid engine of the waterworld. Philosophers all, then we pray:…
Marquette Henley’s stepson, Lance, had always been a distant boy, dull-eyed and solitary, not at all like the eager young athletes Marquette waited on in his store. Lance spent most of his time watching television with the lights off and the curtains drawn. Blond and pale-eyed, he had skin that seemed to whiten with each…
Yesterday I fell into a ditch trying to reach across to the fattest prizes—slipped, my rump hitting the prickly ground so hard I thought of sudden love. The ripest ones will drop into your hand at a brush of the branch. I can spot them now, the ones so black they’re almost blue, crow-colored. That…
The dream rises and falls like the breath of a sleeper in long smooth mirroring waves. My mother arises, presses against the surface of the water, which to her appears a flat gold-leafed roof or sky. But for my part I can see her figure made responsible by the water, no longer mirror-black and reckless,…
The billboards into Lovelock, Nevada, promised dinner and drink coupons, a roll of quarters, hot showers, cable television, king-sized beds, breakfast coupons, twenty-four-hour free coffee, air conditioning, and a swimming pool, all for only thirty-nine ninety-nine, and Benjamin West, after three nights dozing in rest stops by the side of the interstate, could not help…
When the first radio wave music escaped Earth’s ionosphere, it literally did become eternal. Music, in this century, has been converted from sound into the clarity of pure light. Radio has superseded the constraints of space. —Leonard Shlain, Art & Physics Imagine Vivaldi suddenly falling on the ears of a woman somewhere beyond Alpha Centauri,…
Two heaps of clothes by an old stump, and Nicholas neck-deep in that water too cold for our own good. Shimmering when he said he wasn’t sure but thought maybe it was a man he wanted, though I was what he had under his hands in that blue current. Blue of the nearly and almost….
How could a grown man with any self-respect sit in the Ghirardelli Chocolate Factory at eleven o’clock in the morning and eat a hot fudge sundae with mint chip ice cream, hold the nuts? It was Charlie’s own question; his answer was that he wasn’t a grown man, he was a grown boy, or maybe…
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