We three brothers spent the afternoon outside in the haze and half rain. We trekked the empty field out behind the decommissioned paper mill where our father used to work and we were fallen upon by ashes from Mount St. Helens, which had erupted three days ago, and once more two days after. Though the…
I’m surviving, Walter said. There was sun and those small birds that Rome is full of in March. There were daisies coming up in the grass and a line of olives and Walter Meltort, the art historian, was on the phone to New York. We’ve finished the morning round of papers. We’ve had lunch. Now…
People called his music inspired and wicked. They said the man was gifted with crazy guitar fingers that could make you weep one moment and get you shouting hot damn the next. His first manager used to brag to any ear that would listen: Take your girl to hear him, Kreuter will get you laid—and…
Tuesday I’m trying to figure out if you can have two thoughts at once. I mean really think about two things simultaneously, not like be hungry and do math at the same time, which is what I was doing when I originally started wondering in the first place. Focus is my Achilles’ heel. Eric figured…
I was packing up my stuff to go home when Valdez stepped on a forgotten land mine in the field near our barracks. Carver and I ran outside and watched a faraway cloud of dust and Valdez particles float back down to the ground. “Shit,” I said. “Who even knew there were mines out there?”…
Monte set the glass down and raised the gun, waved it around like a kid with a toy. Elgin was across the table, his hands in his lap. “Whatta you say I just shoot you right here and now?” Monte said, like he might or might not be joking. But then Elgin shot first, a…
In the first full summer of our marriage, when Karen and I were expecting our first child, someone tried to break in one night through the back door. Before that, I’d been going on a lot of solitary night walks. It was one of the hottest summers on record. We were renting the ground floor…
The crab apple tree had just fluttered its pink petals over the front lawn when Mary Dooley pulled up to the curb in the small U-Haul. I was on my balcony polishing my toenails—a deep red to contrast with my winter pallor. I paused, the tiny brush suspended over my baby toe, to watch as…
I got involved with Gregg Evans Langley through my friend Xandy, a young mime artist I had befriended when we were teaching at Chautauqua once. Xandy phoned to tell me he’d met a guy at a Chelsea opening who had a weekend place near me and he’d given him my number. The only details Xandy…
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