Used as he was to announcing his arrival triumphantly, no matter how late at night, the homecoming captain in his winter uniform searched the thick ivy growth on the pillar of the gate, and as he felt the marble cavity around the electric bell, he pushed that bell and kept pushing it, until he heard…
I "His sentence hung over him like the sword of Damocles." I am reading aloud from Lester Schwabb's paper. "That's dreadful," I say, looking up. "What a way to begin a story!" Lester Schwabb is working away at his peeling lips. Everyone else is smiling. They love it when I abuse Lester Schwabb. I shouldn't,…
When the car came into sight from in front of the barn, it had already picked up dust, the wheels and shiny hubcaps going round, the windows rolled up tight. Two women sat in the front seat, their hair in silver curls, their powdered faces perfectly still behind the bright glass. The car left the…
The silent train ascended through forest and alongside a torrent so cold and so swift the water was white, and small white birds flew up like spray. On a bridge undergoing repairs the train came to a halt. Just outside Thomas Lang’s window, a workman in a black knit cap was hammering at a railing,…
It is morning. After Lena has stripped Marigold's udder and strained the goat's milk into the refrigerator jug; after she has fed the horses and the dogs; and after she has shooed Evvie's gander off the lawn to the edge of the fire pond and scattered a handful of grain there to keep him interested,…
(from a novel to be called: Nothing Happens in Carmincross) Below them is the sweep of the valley, widening from nothing in the grey-brown mountains down to deep green pasture-land. The river winds in the most approved style. The farmhouses are square and white and solid. No poverty in this part of the world. Never…
One day the physician Oberdorfer approached Kepler with a stealthy smile and – could it be? – a wink, and invited him to come on a certain day to the house of Herr Georg Hartmann von Stubenberg, a merchant of the town. Kepler did not know the man, but he went, thinking he was to…
Translations is set in a hedge-school, a kind of ad hoc classical academy, in an Irish-speaking community in County Donegal. It is late August 1833, and at this time the British Army is conducting the first Ordnance Survey of Ireland. The two short extracts that follow are from the first half of Act Two. Lieutenant…
Almost overnight the summer had disappeared. The morning I was to leave for the cottage and meet Peter there was a damp, north wind, and constellations of leaves flattened on the sidewalk two stories below seemed strangely three-dimensional. I wasn't sure if I were staring or looking. I had been thinking about one of my…
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