Her family moved to town from Omaha on Christmas Eve. Her father and mother are the new managers of the Sherman Ice Arena, which, thanks to the coal-baron millionaire who owns it, is open all year. It is mid-January now, skating season. Half the town goes to the public skate on Saturday afternoon, the experience…
Rusty Bickers went walking through the fields at dusk, Rusty Bickers with a sadness and nobility that only Joseph could see. Joseph dreamed of Rusty Bickers at the kitchen table, eating Captain Crunch cereal before bedtime, his head low, lost in thought; Rusty Bickers, silent but awake beneath the blankets on his cot, his hands…
I’m driving my aunt Sarah’s Lexus, taking us to the meat place. We pass farms with pastures full of Holsteins and green trees. Weeds fill the ditches. Beyond, in the woods, are deer, raccoons, and skunks. Sometimes, driving on the road, I see them try to cross. Sometimes I see a carcass. I used to…
Before Edward stood and pointed his camera toward the table, Kelvyn hadn’t noticed the way that the glass top held the islands’ Bible-blue sky and the fat white puffs of cloud. That Edward noticed made her happy (she knew that the pictures he’d shot of her back in their adjoining cabins were of an entirely…
Here was my Wednesday ten o’clock: Robert James Coates, according to the file on my desk. But he refused to answer to that name, and at our first meeting, after the guard left us alone, insisted I call him Dog, which naturally I wouldn’t do. “All right, then, whatever, call me D,” he said agreeably,…
These two satisfied towns gaze at each other like old flames across Mobile Bay—handsome, hidebound Mobile with its lawyers and its cemeteries, and blithe Fairhope, pretty Fairhope, with its galleries and boutiques, Point Clear draped along the eastern shore like a string of pearls. Used to be, the right kind of Mobile family escaped to…
When Megan first moved to London, she lived in the top of a house at the top of Brixton Hill that seemed to her, all fresh and green and hopeful as she was, the very best place in the city. She had been staying in a thieves’ hostel near Victoria while she was looking for…
What they don’t seem to understand is that I like things the way they are. It’s become very fashionable for people to appear on these television shows, these so-called reality programs about people BURIED ALIVE, people DROWNING IN THEIR OWN POSSESSIONS, obese old men surrounded by expired, unrefrigerated yogurt containers and wisp-haired, rail-thin ladies with dead cats rotting underneath piles…
1. When the brindled cow was five, she got an infected eye. Arlene took her to the vet in Armstead to have the eye examined, perhaps removed. The brindled cow wasn’t worth the vet bill, but she was a pet of sorts. Arlene loaded the cow into the horse trailer, delivered her to the…
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