Don’t doubt there’s a future. Rushing toward you. It was flat pavement, a busy pedestrian mall between downtown streets where she was walking in the tattered sunshine of a moist April morning when without warning the sidewalk tilted to her left, and a sharp pain like a wasp’s stinging attacked the calf of her left…
In the first week of the last month of the semester, a new young inmate came into the classroom, took a seat, and watched the teacher with sharp eyes. Soon he was involved with discussions-even wrote essays, original stuff, quick-zipped them off, so smart. Sharp, and charming, good-looking yet warm, yet an edge of violence….
for John Casey It is only ever about power, see. Pick the crowd and pick your vantage point, then watch. Learn the con, you have to learn to look for what does not originate in ordinary. Hats will tow you in; and shoes. One good hour on watched shoes you learn the lessons of…
I’ll tell you what I know. Although my name is in that wonderful program-“Melissa Halliday” is me, right there under “Principals”-I know myself enough to know that my shining moment was a mistake, which is okay since my mother taught me self-respect, my father taught me common sense, and living with my brother has put…
My husband often traced what he called the minor flaws of my character to Kansas City, Missouri-a city he placed in the dead middle of the Midwest, a “stunningly homogeneous” town, he liked to say, where it must have been horrifyingly easy for me to grow up believing untruths about the world. Often enough I…
The advice note, dropped on my father’s desk in the first week of September 1955, lay unread for a week. My father was away from home, resolving a dispute over burial sites in Manchester. He was a synagogue troubleshooter, the Red Adair of Anglo-Jewish internecine struggles, and it was his job to travel up and…
Fei Lo noticed the new clerk right away, a persimmon in a basket of oranges. Three letters on a gold-toned plaque spelled out her name. So as to make no mistake, the old gentleman wrote it in his notebook, fur. He liked to know the names of all the women tellers, as he flirted with…
He thinks about the water often: sitting in traffic; in a chair in his office; in bed with his wife, Jeanette, who is now asleep. Together they live the life of the city, Phoenix, where the smog blisters the horizon and the swimming pools are treated by experts. Byron, his brother-in-law, runs a pool cleaning…
This is my tale about the Vietnam War; at least I think it qualifies. This story, however, comes no nearer to Phnom Penh than 10,000 miles: blame this lack of action on my year of birth-1954-and blame it on my gender. A muddy river does appear later on in this story, and you’ll see a…
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