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….
Under the shade of the mulberry trees, he leans through the DeSoto's rear window arranging samples of carpet and tile, moulding and cove base, furniture brochures and carpet tack with its blue nails as gnarled as shark teeth, and then he stacks the odd suitcases of carpet squares, front-to- back, back-to-front, their plastic handles clicking…
The few years I've spent working with apprentice writers have given me reason to cherish surprises almost above all else. I don't know if conformism is a stronger force in the literature of our time than any other's, but certainly it is insidiously powerful; looking about yourself (in the academy or in the marketplace) you're…
With gratitude I recommend to readers this story written by a writer who was a young man in the sixties in America, and who survived the colliding hopes and promises, and the shattering of so many of them, the shattering even of the very sources of so many of them, during that time in our…
It was nothing more than a summer job, hopping the low fence to my neighbor's house where I paid out the long hollow pole through my hands, and dipped the skimmer's blue jaw into the pool to strain the insect wings, bird feathers and carob leaves that lay like the night's siftings on a huge…
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