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…
Spring here before we thought and you wooden with your daughter's death. I count two facts, coincidental, with a child's irrational fear of the dark, the stern fragility of my own daughter after a bad dream. We keep our quiet economies day after day, moving between office, store, and home, all normal as the ordinary…
Crickets in the basement stairwell (funky with leaf-rot, mildew, sweating concrete) screel a daylong prayerwheel with jays and starlings punctuating that chitinous ratcheting. Summer is winding down. On the mantel downstairs a steadier clucking housed in ceramic, and looking like a linoleum-covered Taj Mahal, releases a cogwheel, whirs, bongs, reminds me of Dallie (Miss Valeria…
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