The stone walls had lost the stone life of Under-earth, and, against the air, set their mouths in a jagged seam. The sky gave no rich press of the pores of life, no movement like the womb's stirrings of a vein, a root, a worm. In this world of the exposed skull, rain was simply…
Lucky indeed is the young writer who has a background like Josip Novaikovich. No shortage of something to write about. Listen. He grew up in Yugoslavia, the son of a clog-maker in a mountain town. Matters got complicated, seeing that his family was of a small group of Baptists in a Communist country that was…
From the beginning, Marshall Klimasewiski has instinctively known the point where a story or an anecdote becomes fiction. His earliest efforts, when he had just enrolled as a Creative Writing major here at Carnegie Mellon, already had that center to them, that crossing of emotions which distinguishes a genuine short story, even though these efforts…
Reading about how in mythologies god came down in a shower of gold or some such immaculate way to mate with mortals, I think of how my daughter Angel came to be conceived in the front seat of an old '56 Lincoln after bar-closing time. And of how, with panties in my pocket, an unhooked…
The receiver is back in its cradle. Against the windows of this house my brother has never visited, and never will visit, a light rain begins to fall. Why do we persist in honoring the tragic? the outsized? the doomed?—when it's what is small and diminishing that defeats us: that is us. You know, I…
My father looked very healthy on the day of his death. There was radiance in his face, light in his eyes, his cheeks were ruddy with a good circulation of blood. It was December 6th, and there was a slanted snowstorm outdoors. When you looked through the window, you had a feeling that the whole…
They are together and asleep between cotton sheets when the phone rings. Early morning bleeds blue through tinted shades. Tanner reaches back to the endstand for the receiver without rolling over. He recognizes the heavily accented voice of his father-in-law instantly, though he has not heard it in years. The line is thick with fuzzy…
A summer night, Detroit about to suffocate on its own exhausts, I headed west on Victor looking for Tessie. Leaning late in her window, Mrs. Kessarjian across the street was still in her black dress as if waiting for business. Hammer and Borka and their gangs on the corner of John R and Victor banged…
In language both sensitive and terse, "Close to Autumn" explores the feelings of a motherless child. Edie is seven and long accustomed to living alone with her agreeable, devoted young father. She shyly admires his new girlfriend, too, and comes to cherish moments when the three of them can be together. But she is unaccountably…
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