In bed I’m a mad Hungarian. Propped on pillows, a cup of hot black tea on the night table. I hear a strain of bitter chords a gypsy cart halting. If I could go back that far would I find a small face similar to mine? The crust surrounding a pit of ghetto and merchants…
You think you earned this space on earth, but look at the gold face of the teen-age pharaoh, smug as a shriner in his box with no diploma, a plot flashy enough for Manhattan. Early death, then what a task dragging a sofa into the grave, a couple of floor lamps, the alarm set for…
At the table she used to sew at, he uses his brass desk scissors to cut up his shirt. Not that the shirt was that far gone: one ragged cuff, one elbow through; but here he is, cutting away the collar she long since turned. What gets to him finally, using his…
You chose me for widow not for wife transferring your pain on schedule I turned darker you turned paler on schedule. You chose me for elegy. This spring the confused migrations collide with the smokeless chimney. I air myself out with the mildewed wardrobe you left hung like an armory. Oh you’ve done it, you’ve…
He is the nail and she hits him on the head. Slowly, but most definitely he is disappearing. He is reappearing becoming the board becoming the wall and the walls becoming her home and such a home has she chosen that the windows often change their positions and the floor is wall to wall elevator….
On the inside edge of suburbs nothing approaches bear. Laying rubber around a one-way block, trying to find a man named Evanshevski, I stop to ask a man if he is him. He promises to help. Nothing approaches bear. No way anyway to go for help. We drive around, trying to find a one-way girl…
"Would you like to go and see the fields, Jenny?" Ellen asked her. They were clearing the breakfast plates into a sink full of soapy water when she said this, and the question seemed sudden and out of context. Jennifer supposed it was just a thoughtless question to break up the silence, for she realized…
Packing up, a new swing around a lamp post and down the gummy street each step has a trash can has a wall with a window with curtains has a railing and a pair of legs rising from high heels up and up on through her shoulders up above the rooftops. Night lit like a…
For more than twenty years now, Gina Berriault has been writing remarkably sensitive and powerful fiction. Her style is lucid, lyrical and very much her own, and she seems to have any number of strategies for breaking your heart. The first Gina Berriault story I ever read, long ago, let me know at once that…
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