Through the clotted street and down the alley to the station, the halting rhythm of the bus disrupts her dream and makes the broad blond fields of grain yield to an agitated harbor, whales nuzzling flank to flank. Now the bus settles in its gate. She wakes, smoothes her stockings, gathers her packages, the stunned…
No huckster. She wakes in her earthworks enraged. A bush burns. She grizzles. The whole world turns ash and she gladdens. Mutterous rumbles: beware, soil, repent. She chivvies, nights, digs locks tenacious great jaws in the lair of her skull. She consumes. She maintains her autochthonous visions. There in the roots — look, see what…
Still in sleeping bags, the promised delivery only words as usual, our lives upside down, we are transients lost in thirteen rooms built by a judge who died. The landlord says they mean no harm, the bats, and still I wake at the shrill whistling, the flutter overhead. I fumble to a tall window open…
Someone is late, I'm waiting. The hot smell of rain on the street brings you close, now that you are of little use and gone. Two boys throw yellow and blue balloons. Distended with water they swag down the air, plop into the boys' open hands. This will be summer to them, in Palo Alto…
S. P. I say what mist may among pines adrift say what the telling water leaf to leaf falling re counts as if in shorthand as well, too, as what the mockingbird's piccolo picks out repeatedly to keep in her wet yet lofty…
The smell of the hospital worked at John Latham as he rode the elevator up. Childhood fears had been implanted; the hospital air was still always hard for him to breathe. It was not easier this afternoon. The drive had been long and hot enough to steepen his hatred. He really had known better than…
In the kitchen the toaster pops too quickly, the water boils away and something burns, and she turns on herself, a predator breaking a mirror. Door bell jammed with no one there, the screen door sags, its rusted mesh reducing her porch light to squares. People gather and huddle for advice then telephone. Inside, she's…
There was a dance at the black school. In the shot houses people were busy. A woman washed her boy in a basin, sucking a cube of ice to get the cool. The sun drove a man in the ground like a stake. Before his short breath climbed the kitchen's steps She skipped down the…
Shelby Foote is the author of six novels – Tournament, Follow Me Down, Love in a Dry Season, Shiloh, Jordan County, and September September – as well as his magnificent historical work in three large volumes, The Civil War: A Narrative, which is already considered a classic. Mr. Foote lives in Memphis, Tennessee, where he…
No products in the cart.