Outside their bed-size shacks, figures sit, mummied in zippered suits, flicking wands above the six-inch holes. In their palms they will show you tiny gold and silver jigs from Sweden, bits of neon sponge, a jar of pickled roe. At their feet, buckets of minnows to be skewered and lowered in offering. In worse weather,…
Though unable to imagine how harm could fit in there, in that tiny case, I thought I knew enough to stay afraid. But once, moving through the quiet house, I thought, if I can’t hear my own steps, how can God? And in the laundry room, by the dryer humming out its heat,…
Somewhere in the midwest crabapples are falling on a new Buick; crabapples are littering the sidewalk and a man is muttering darkly to himself. It’s not pleasant to contemplate these crabapples. Ordinarily he’d be having fun oiling the doors of his Buick in perfect silence. But not today. No sir. Not with these crabapples falling….
We could not cook down there. It was like a black mouth we lived inside. But who was speaking? What language were we? In the darkness the odors made my nose itch. Cold salami, figs, raw peppers and onions, bread and garlic, bodies of young women like me, men smoking stale tobacco. Your father was…
The man said to me, Did you used to live in so-and-so, and I answered yes. Across the street, the opera had just let out. A good cold rain had stopped. My window faces a part of the sky that’s never red. At either end of the day, some loosening behind the trees, a little…
in the back room where the safe is in the backroom with a sick baby crying my grandmother tapping the pane under the apples leaves my mother is 8 she new doll’s head lies smashed on the floor she is hating her brother spirea on the sidewalk she is hating her brother and running into…
When I see the mules lurching down the hillside, tobacco sheaves quivering like ragmops, I can’t see myself anywhere else. My village below is a failing hive, the young swarming into adulthood to feed the honeycomb America. Wives hover alone by their doors, watching the dust, daughters move in pairs buying bread and salt. They…
The bathroom tiles are very pink and new. Out the window, a sixty-foot willow tree forks, droops. Planted eighteen years ago, its huge roots choke the drains. The very blue sky is impenetrable. I hear you whine outside the locked door. You’re going to cry. If I open the door, I’ll slap you. I’ve hit…
(Simla, India) It is March— the big change. Nothing is certain in the weather. Clouds are moving all over the mountains, the sun, the rain slanting into the hills. We walk for an hour, then look over the bowl of the valley— deep as a sea, birds floating and diving like fishes gliding among a…
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