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 Radio has superseded the constraints of space.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…
Rhonda felt Cy’s ribs through his T-shirt that proclaimed rock-and-roll in thunderbolt letters. The leather jacket he wore today magnified him: his height, the breadth of his shoulders, the glimmer of fear he struck in her. Suddenly she was afraid that this was all they had, a striking look that turned heads, a few sexy…
A man in the south of France flaps his elbows and dances with a female crane, who is the last of the Black-tails. He hoots and coos, and she lowers her long delicate neck. Yesterday the man had sunned and swum amid a swarm of nude swimmers in the Riviera’s cloudy waters, so that now…
Right away, I started meeting people who knew my brother. A bank teller cashing a traveler’s check for me was one. At first, she gave me a half-glance when I passed the check through the window towards her, more interested in the amount than my identity. Then she noticed my last name and slowly lifted…
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