Elaine and I had been working in the lab, dismantling the sleep research equipment, when the call came from the Secret Agency. We hadn’t planned on a big project so soon. Elaine wanted to go up to Union City to see our son, Grant, and his wife, Karla, and the baby. We missed them, and…
Her eye followed the slim border of scrolled wood running the length of the bar’s chalet roof, then tracked down to the window which afforded a view of rows and rows of parked cars dull in the evening sun, and finally reversed direction across bare-topped surface to her raised forearm and bent wrist, resembling a…
As Pastor Everett made the announcements that began the service, Clareese Mitchell stood with her choir members, knowing that once again she had to Persevere, put on the Strong Armor of God, the Breastplate of Righteousness, but she was having her monthly womanly troubles, and all she wanted to do was curse the Brothers’ Church…
She had passed a Wilderness, an Apache, an Escaper, a Montana, and, tragically, a Swinger. Now it was a Yellowstone Capri, the geezer in the wheelhouse plying the highway, scanning for snags. You can be Yellowstone, or you can be Capri, Helen thought. But you can’t, big buddy, be both. She dusted it. The motor…
Chicago, April 18, 1994 Had I been dreaming, I would have dreamt of being someone else, with a little creature burrowed in my body, clawing at the walls inside my chest-a recurring nightmare. But I was awake, listening to the mizzle in my pillow, to the furniture furtively sagging, to the house creaking under the…
On that night, years back, we were up until the cardinals started calling. The first one lit out through the leaves before the air went from warm to hot. I remember that the call sounded lonely in the quiet of early morning. But soon, just before it got light, many of them were fussing in…
In a deep socket of an empty acre lot in South Jersey, a wiry boy with dark eyebrows, burnished blond hair, and thick lenses in his glasses is clearing pathways through the milkweeds, trying to preserve as many of the leafy, muscular stalks as he can. He’s working harder than he’s worked in weeks, so…
There was no house yet, just a wellhead where the house would be, under an overturned box to keep the sand out. Clay was building the house, and it would be one to live in for a long time, so they were trying to get everything right. From the passenger seat, Susan watched him wedge…
1. I am my father’s sidekick, Mutt to his Jeff, Costello to Abbott, Tonto to the Lone Ranger. I am his pal, his fall guy. I follow him like a shadow. He calls me “Me Too.” Sure there’s a comic strip character named Me Too, but I am too young to know that. I fall…
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