Rain chewed fresh gullies in the ridge road, turning the hard clay dirt to a yellow paste. The ditch overflowed and gray air blurred the low horizon. Dripping tree leaves hung limp and heavy, aimed at the ground. "It'll pass," Mercer said. Coe lit a cigarette and opened the pickup's window an inch. Pellets of…
On his first day at the new job, Joe Frisch was assigned a Haitian woman. Frisch, a refugee himself from grad school, sat at one of a dozen identical metal desks in the Boston office of the Department of Public Welfare, while his new boss hovered over him with one buttock on the desktop: Gillooley,…
Mr. Lee. as he transferred chicken feed from the large bin to his everyday pitcher, noticed how the dust rose from the seeds, how steam rises from a landscape, cold, or hot from a white cup of café con leche, how smoke rises from a casual backyard fire, how a soul is given up from…
When Gracie Kang's elder twin sisters reached the age of eighteen, they went down to the Alameda County Shipyards and got jobs piecing battleships together for the U.S. Navy. This was the place to find a husband in 1945, if a girl was doing her own looking. They were Americans, after all, and they were…
In the mornings I get to the mall before anyone else, even the other shop owners. They haven't got the music on yet, and all I can hear as I set up is the plish-plosh of the fountain. Without any flowers covering my cart, you can notice the builder's skill-wooden pegs at the joints, not…
As an Asian In 1965, when I was nine, my father moved us from Japan to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He had been an exchange student at Louisiana State University years ago, and now LSU had invited him to be a visiting professor in the agriculture department. We rented an apartment near campus, across the street…
Divina Trace is a Caribbean novel set on the island of Corpus Christi. It is the story of Magdalena and her mysterious child, believed by the islanders to be half-man and half-frog (crapo). Magdalena is transformed into a miraculous black Madonna later in the book, and she becomes the island's collective goddess and patron saint-worshipped…
The truck skidding, myself running, getting nowhere, still hanging onto some foolish piece of laundry, a flowered pillowcase. The truck skidding silently into the tree. My body opening to a big empty scream, Molly. The scream turning to glass, nothing in it, no child. I went back to work, a week or so later, after…
"Pity the poor man," I hear them say, over steaming platters of red beans and rice and leaning against dreary gray storefronts. "He had the whole world in his shirt pocket." I hear them and I cry. It's Lester Banks they speak of Slim, malleably built, brown swells about his eyes that darken with his…
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