Sit, he orders. She sits But Heaven knows he was only talking to the dog. Folding down bedclothes, he discovers his socks she made into them. He's already rewashed dinner dishes while she was in the shower. Still, in bed she alone teaches him how to cross his eyes. Holding his penis like a microphone,…
Sarah didn't pause to watch the water-seller scurry from his spot in the shade to the path leading to the ruins and gardens. The shallow copper bowls ringed to the belts crisscrossing his bright red shirt jangled softly and flashed in the sunlight. The water-seller made a show of splashing the ground in front of…
Almost time to dress for the sun's total eclipse so the child pastes one last face in her album of movie stars—Myrna Loy and Olivia de Havilland—names meant to conjure sultry nights, voluptuous turns across some dance floor borne on clouds. Jean Harlow. Clipped from the Newark evening paper, whole galaxies of splendid starlets gaze,…
There was a flatiron brick building built to tower over a gasoline station, a billboard against the wall—I don't know, Drink Milk, a white pillar of it filling a glass—a Gulf sign swinging over Princess Street, and at the top of the hill to Garfield Elementary, a bridge over Pennsy railroad tracks, and if a…
I pick him up and take him to the beach. He is always the same and always his sameness changes me. It takes him forever to fold his yellow shirt and blue Bermudas and finally sit. Counting rented umbrellas, he calls out their red and green colors, updating the information every minute. Sun closes in….
It rains in Rodney, in the winter. But we have history; even for Mississippi, we have that. There's a sweet olive tree that grows all the way up to the third story, where Elizabeth's sun porch is. Butterflies swarm in the front yard, in the summers, drunk on the smell of the tree; but in…
Frayed cables bear perilously the antiquated lift, all glass and wrought iron past each apartment floor like those devices for raising and lowering angels of rescue in Medieval plays. Last night the stairwell lamps flickered off and I was borne up the seven floors in darkness, the lift a small lit cage where I thought…
I go only part way back tonight, sidetracked by fly buzz and the lies of old letters, and then Blotchy starts killing flies again and all the years between do their crumbling act, off-stage voices whispering cues I can't quite catch—wind and rivers, dead time plucking corroded wires. The light changes and we're in that…
I went back to Dagger Point Trail after she moved to Baton Rouge. A plaque at the point says the sea takes back five inches a year, but I couldn't tell. The sand and shells seemed the same and live oak still crowned the hills. I remember the redtail tearing the rabbit on the path…
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