From where she was sitting at the kitchen table, her hands deep in the ball of dough in a green bowl, she could see him cross the creek beyond the lower pasture and angle up toward the house. He stopped to lean on the fence that bordered the remains of the summer garden, where the…
It was Rob Baxter's guard dog again. Maddy laid her arm over her scratchy eyes and wondered who the mutt was after tonight. It felt too early for the paper boy, too late for some man strolling with his girlfriend. When the barking didn't stop, Maddy threw back covers and got out of bed. Charlie…
Cecily's parents are divorcing, and perhaps for revenge, perhaps to distract, perhaps to build self-esteem, her mother Kate has taken to frenetic self-improvement. Shopping trips, perms and cuts, nail wraps, aerobic exercises, massages. Now she is going to Calistoga to the mud baths. Cecily finds the idea of mud baths bizarre, yet, curious and amused…
Ben wriggles around, crowding closer. He's cold. More than that, he wants his mother to be awake. He presses against her, feeling for her heartbeat. It's not a beat he can count, separate knocks through her skin. It's more a constant soft rustle, like a mouse scratching around under a pile of dry leaves. There's…
Years ago on a Sunday afternoon in late October Hetty and her mother's boyfriend Dyan Trumball-the one who played acoustical guitar with a local band-were walking in the lakeside park a few miles from Hetty's mother's house. Hetty was thirteen years old at the time with a narrow face and dark warm watchful eyes-so nervously…
Something happens in the water: first of all, you are weightless; this is the first thing Rosie noticed, remembers. She learns to swim the ordinary way many of us learn: a small rectangular pool in a day camp in the Indiana dunes, one hour's ride through smelly south Chicago, past the threatening smokestacks of Gary,…
FIRE One girl among us set herself on fire. She used gasoline. She was too young to drive at the time. I wondered how she'd gotten hold of it. Had she walked to her neighborhood garage and told them her father's car had run out of gas? I couldn't look at her without thinking about…
Walter could almost feel the rush of breath, hear the women roaring, mothers, girlfriends, sisters, sweeping up towards the flight deck, the warm fall day, San Francisco, 1945. A couple chasing a blue jump-suited baby girl just beginning to walk wobbled by him in exaggerated pursuit. He had been alone that day. Hadn’t wanted to…
The mismatched, worn plates waited on the table, clouds of steam rose from the kettle of boiling potatoes and condensed on the windows. Mae slid the big frying pan onto the hot front lid and knocked in a spoonful of bacon fat. When the pan smoked she laid in thick pieces of pork side meat….
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