Late night in early winter. The last hour of the long drive home. I tend to the thermostat, keeping the car warm enough for my sleeping family, but not so warm that my focus turns dull. Beyond the chilled glass to my left, green dashboard lights angle up toward the stars. Distance defines our relations….
The time Anne left her husband, she went to France. She spent the first few days in Paris at an inexpensive hotel in the sixth arrondissement on rue Jacob. Her room was small and sparsely furnished; the bathroom, too, was small, the shower produced a tepid trickle. Instead of looking out onto the busy street,…
The Drowned Boy Our ghost was the soul of a standard five. One afternoon, nineteen years before, the boy drowned while swimming in the far dam, up near the ruined, roofless buildings of what people still called Old Goas. (We lived at New Goas, but nobody graced our place with that title anymore.) Back then,…
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…
Dimitri and I are half-naked when the woman shows up with the dogs. He is sitting up and I am astride him, my dress around my waist. What we had thought to be a secluded park looking out on an all-but-abandoned pond is actually someone’s backyard. “We’re clean-living people here,” the woman says. Then the…
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