On a Sunday morning in June, Paul and Judith finished cleaning their apartment, left the key in the mailbox, and drove across town to the house Paul had left on a gray and windy day last March. It was the first house his father had ever bought: a small yellow one with a green door,…
The hump on her back was bad when she crawled out of bed at dawn to make breakfast for her grand-niece. It was an ugly hump, but small, almost unnoticeable when she wore large collars sewn with lace and ribbons. Now she didn't care. She pulled her bathrobe over the aching knot of spine. Last…
For courting surfaces unscathed, to pass over furnace rocks, to slide down an oily pane or walk the waters, tension held, requires a lightness, speed, yearning, the danger’s to stop, look down, attend until you deepen, disappear, an aspect of where you are, at one with its hue and weather, weight and changing, as a…
Baptized name, William; but in the main, except for when he was in the service, he can't remember being called anything else but Skeeter, no more than he can place when he started drinking so hard. Sometimes, though, this comes back to him: a summer night when he was maybe three or four, fishing for…
There is a belief among the Malays that if a woman dies an early death there are certain precautions that must be taken. When she is put into the ground she must be put in with gold in her mouth and eggs in her armpits. If these two rituals are not performed she will leave…
He’s turning into a Mason jar for homecured liver pickle; showing a fine regard for black Jack Daniel’s. I saw him once in a silence so pure I thought of the gulls who stand on the Charles so long you think their soles are frozen flat. The other time he sang, said he’d spent his…
Willie Mae worked at the slaughter house slitting hogs' throats. From eight to six she stood with her knife and blood-spattered apron performing her task. Willie Mae was efficient. One sharp slash at the vital vein, one last shrill squeal from the hog and it was over. Bud picked her up at six in the…
I colored her teeth yellow between the cherry lines. She flitted her tongue across her lemon ivories. Tongues are the color of hothouse tomato pulp. Tongues are good for so many quiet immersions. Low calorie. Pushed between your mashed potato porcelains, uniting, slithering around your oral phallus, tickling the smooth cavern of sacred soul palate….
That last of schoolgirl summers — oh, all guts and sweet simplicity, I took Europe in a sturdy stride. Polite, intense, grasping German grammar, my days a neat balance. . . The mornings meant gardens in sunlight, streudel and cream at eleven. Evenings, the medieval towns, my brother strolling in them, ending always in yellow…
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