Just before noon on a Friday that is, better late than never, the first perfect day of spring, a bell on the Commons starts to ring. For years this bell had been bolted inside an Erie & Lackawanna train engine, riding the rails along the Cuyahoga River, less than a mile to the west of…
“It is the only way to end poverty,” says El Presidente. I look at the land below us and yearn for green and blue, instead of this ash gray, dust brown. A hazy sun. My eyes burn. I have not been home for going on two hundred days. This morning, I looked in the mirror…
translation by Owen Good It’s there. It’s gone. Both. Almost always. I didn’t go out for four days; I was inside the entire time. I stocked up on wine. At the time, I never considered that I shouldn’t, that I should do something to combat this; I forget resolutions I’d previously made…
They depart in the early morning hours in a rainstorm, and as they drive north the sheets of falling water turn to windblown snow. The client leads in an SUV with a couple of his employees; Jake follows in his own SUV, Reggie beside him. Despite the weather, the client presses the speed limit, 75…
The end of my labors has come. Such things have been revealed to me that all I have written seems as so much straw. Now I await the end of my life. —Thomas Aquinas 1. How did I come to God? As you see me. In these dark Kentucky woods. The hermitage—really no more…
In memory of my father, Donald French Williford and his father, Carl Lex Williford November 1998 1. The first time I decided to drive to Dallas after I’d stayed away for too many years, my mother told me on the phone, “I’m so glad you’re coming home, honey, and so’s your father. Would you like…
Translation by Christopher Peacock In some places, hapa is a generic term for dogs. But where I come from, the word hapa refers not to the wild, ferocious Tibetan mastiffs kept by nomads, but to a Pekingese: one of those squat, fluffy, snub-nosed, flat-faced, stout-legged little Chinese dogs that shuffles about the house and the…
On the night before the first day of school, a video was released, and it began to circulate among the parents, teachers, and students of Baldwin Clap Elementary. The video featured Miss Korto, a fourth- and fifth-grade Social Studies teacher, and presented her as a finalist in the National Teacher of the Year Program. Claire…
Of course, they choose the Fourth of July to reenact their childhood, a holiday known for explosions, maimed limbs, trumped-up loyalty. The kids—Abby will never stop calling them that—have grown unduly nostalgic in the past year, mythologizing her mediocre dinners, romanticizing their sporadic vacations, basically whitewashing decades of benign neglect into a family life that…
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