Fiction

The Fisherman’s Son: Teresa Pantaluna Once there was a poor but honest man, what we call un’omu di pazienza, a man of patience, who worked the whole day-day after day-in the unrelenting heat of the scorching sun, casting his nets out into the blue sea, then rowing his little boat wide and far so as…

T he squad was made up of three girls from a school. The girls’ names was Debbie, Donna, and Shenay. They was stalwart, steady, and statuesque, always going round not hurting old people or weak boys but helping them. They strolled down Ronald Drive and Cahill Street to Nathalie Avenue to way over to Jefferson…

There were two women I thought might be able to help me, or rather help Lance, and that night, sitting on the bus on the way home from the hospital, I vowed to find one or both of them the next day, even if I had to cancel a couple of my afternoon classes to…

Later the squat white cylinders with their delicate indentations would be revealed as a species of lantern. But when Krzysztof Wojciechowicz first glimpsed them, dotted among the azaleas and rhododendrons and magnolias surrounding Constance Humboldt’s kidney-shaped swimming pool, he saw them as dolls. The indentations cut the frosted tubes like waists, a third of the…

The Buffalo Vision Late on the third night of the Sun Dance, most of the hundred Crow people within the Big Lodge had fallen asleep. The fire was low, the singers’ voices hoarse over the drumbeat. Only John Sees the Hill still danced in place, his back to the circular wall of upright aspen boughs….

At night the wind sometimes woke him as it sliced across the tin roof of the cabin, and he would open his eyes in darkness to find his hands gripping the bedframe. Thirty-five knots, forty knots-it was impossible not to gauge the speed of the gusts in his mind. He felt, too, the chastened shudder…

from In the Houses of the Good People   When I was a girl I had a place in the stable I’d go to be alone. I cleaned it of all the spider webs and laid down a layer of fresh straw. When Mother began her travail with Elizabeth, I went there to get away…

note: Italicized sections of the text are quotations from Johann Goethe, Rosa Luxemburg, Johnny Cash, Alfred Döblin, Antonio Gramsci, Vladimir Lenin, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Karl Koch, and the Bible.   It never happened. It could not have happened. It could not have happened that at a crowded congress of the Second International held in…

Penn Station, March 1991     I’ve been homeless down here so long I didn’t give up the worship of Jesus Now I got my own room but it’s not in my apartment And God is a good god And children if you’re on that crack don’t get addicted Because me I waited too long…