We were numb to Nebraska, stunned by a land so austere we feared the Sioux would not survive the monotone of country road. Though in love, we did not include in our romance the constancy of cornfields, the slackened flags above each roadside stand. We lived inside a grand idea: we could change The State….
Two girls sit on the railing by the train station. Late spring or early fall, warm enough to melt popsicles. They watch the small figures revolve through the door, the light off the glass, the rushed steps, the drape and color of clothing . . . When enough money is deposited they'll rob the bank….
Elizabeth's next-door neighbors were having a barbecue. Though Elizabeth and Henry had lived in the house since his retirement three years before, they had only once eaten dinner next door, and the neighbors had only once visited them. After Henry's car accident, the Newcombs had called several times, but when Henry returned, they again only…
I think of ecstasy as water. The full moon: habitual and dull. I prefer the mountain to the valley: above the timberline, silence precedes the child, and the accidental scrub seizes one with beauty. I spend evenings in my wingchair imagining the moment before my birth, the rush of air before I descend to need….
She let her heart lead her and it led to an interior where young trees bent and glittered as aspens should. She quaked and could not eat before him until they became accustomed to darkening noon. After awhile her heart said, No not this, and she moved across the river. By now the sun was…
Before supper, my father's wife shouts my brother out. He has come too close, touched her like a son, she said, like a son. I don't want any more sons. And my father, ignoring this too, glad he is on the Florida coast now, goes out into late fall's twilight to pick his grapefruit, ripe…
I was seven. I took the train to Ossining. Blue lights, a symphony domestica, families fastened in across the river from the prison. The air smelled of laundry. At the hospital: coughing, a swinging lightbulb, a few inarticulate phrases. In another century I might have prayed. Did I understand, he asked, what it meant to…
For the rain around Mount Snowden I bought an orange poncho, nylon, paying a pale-eyed Scotsman four pounds in a new glass, aluminum and pine mountain shop outside Capel Curig. From the Isle of Skye, he said. And I further, I replied, to bring juice to his eyes, the old bastard. That's true, he said,…
A mile into the sky our plane is practically nothing. This turbulence of air—also nothing, like the loose cells that float within the eye. Connecticut rolls and pitches below— Einstein was right, mistrusting his own feet, and so was Bishop Berkeley, for a plane glinting unseen among leaden clouds, droning toward the Atlantic unheard, is…
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