Acts of mercy. Acts of love. Perry's winter ministry chilled him through. He could not help anyone. And he was getting fat, eating too much, exercising not at all. His sermons were stale. The words hung in the church, rippled up to the organist in the balcony, then died. The church smelled of dust. And…
“Am I mistaken or didn’t the seem unusually calm that day? As absorbed as a man tying a package. As it turns out, you might say he was just holding his finger to the knot. “And when I called her last week she said she couldn’t chat, she was bleeding like a bag with the…
The big bus wheeled up to the open gate and stopped. The doors hissed open. Larry looked both ways, took a deep breath, and swung the gleaming monster out into the heavy afternoon traffic. Here goes! he shouted silently. He headed for downtown, thinking, Oh Lord, I can't do it. I'll crash. Within fifteen blocks…
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…
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