Once, when she’d been walking in her neighborhood, a car had stopped for directions to Alsop, the psychiatric hospital perched above the Blackstone River. How to get there was complicated, the man already so lost in the tangle of leafy streets that Tess hadn’t been sure where to start. Begin at the beginning, wasn’t that…
It was 1968 and there was a war between the men and the women. Jane heard it on the radio, where for the first time women’s voices read the news; and she saw it at school, where her art teacher, Miss Hannah Shapiro, had started going braless—great wandering breasts shifting this way and that under…
The smell of scattered mothballs as the cottage doors rattled open year after faithful year. There was the sweet rot of paperbacks stretching their spines. Here, men and boys didn’t wear socks with their trousers, and the women talked in whispers scrutinizing newcomers over gin and tonics, straightening their stiff cotton skirts with a propriety…
At first, it is a tiny flap of skin no bigger than a fingernail, like a mole or a birthmark but with more substance. I find it when I’m in the bath, the water cooling around me and my father’s razor floating across the surface, reminding me of his presence below the window in the…
Cootie Munster’s sister is scared of spiders, Jack says, and then Charlie says we should put some down her pants.“We could get those big ones,” he says, “like that came out of the jungle in the movie yesterday.” Kansas City is hot in July and we are sitting in our clubhouse—The Roscoe Turner Flying Corps—which…
Pennsylvania Pennsylvania is the softest state in the Union. Early in its history, when it was still a colony, Pennsylvania passed an ordinance outlawing sharp corners for the good of the citizenry. As a result, the artisans of Pennsylvania pioneered a style of furniture making that came to be known as Rustic Curvature for its…
No one knows where it came from. Some say a long black car pulled up to the gas station and from it stepped a black-haired, black-eyed man in a black suit, who coughed once into his fist and then gripped the pump and muddied it with his phlegm. Others say that late one night—for a…
When I met her, I had the kind of job people always think they want until they try it for a few weeks. I was working as a production supervisor for a studio that made a lot of profitable, mediocre movies, and one of my responsibilities was to find locations where other movie people would…
By midnight, Josif had downed five shots of whiskey, flirted with three girls the wrong side of half his age, and sprawled into a table, clattering aside glasses and bottles. It was my fault. I’d brought him. He was a contract worker from Croatia, and, despite monthly sojourns in the States, he had no friends….
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