LEARNING OUR LINES: 1952 Mommy is dying. There is a lump growing inside her and it takes all the food. Mommy sleeps alone now and Grandmother sleeps on a cot next to Mommy's bed so she can hear if anything happens or she's needed. Daddy sleeps in my bed and I sleep with Sissy in…
How little they ask of the stale winds of traffic— even of the picked-over plots of dirt, the pyracanthas whose sun-red berries will not reappear for months. And so they range on the crust of faith at the edge of all their days— no fields south to fly to, no other life but this. Dark…
I know the place where her body was found. In a tidepool near the fishing rocks where the children once caught a starfish. They placed the starfish in a pie plate filled with an inch of brine. For days it writhed but so slowly the arms didn't seem to move like hour hands on clocks….
The boat sailing over from the island dock, about to capsize near the harbor buoy, was a splash of red and white paint his father knew would catch the boy's eye. We act from feelings, his father said, and unlike the fine detail of foam lacing the white-capped water, true action lives in the beauty…
Breaking and entering, Walter called what he did the night before, and tipped back the bottle of corn whiskey in the cornfield. This bottle he stole, and some jewelry which he threw in a sump. Sumps, he slurred, where the run-off gathers and levels high by morning. Sometimes they'd find a small kid there belly…
The candle burnt down to a nub of wax cannot be lit. The bulb in the ceiling fixture needs to be changed, everything in this house needs work. She closes the bedroom door to extinguish the hallway light left on for the children's sake. We undress, pants slumped in the chair, a blouse falls to…
—on the film by Jean Renoir My wife says they might be Laurel and Hardy: the thin, future son-in-law, Anatole, and the fat father of his Henriette, who clown with fishing poles at the river's edge. Pike! the fat one says. And the thin one—Did you say: the shark that lives in fresh water? Cuts…
We could tell it was him by the knock on the door. He would pound it shaking the whole thing, causing the dogs in the backyard to bark and snarl and leap against the picket fence-a muddy-colored gate, really. I stayed near the back of the kitchen, hands pressed on my knees, all ashy and…
Cara has crooked feet because we're poor. They are twisted up like an old lady's and bunions haunt her big toes. She's getting the wraps off today and she's truly believing her feet are going to be beautiful. Mama spoons some dry pancake mix into her mouth and says, "Don't get your hopes too high….
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