Kenya, Africa. Africa! Nine thousand miles from Portland. My wayward son Tim walks toward me with four tall, dark-as-midnight women. He has seen me, I’m quite sure of it, but nothing about his gait changes. He arrives at the tent and doesn’t say a word, or make any motion toward me. The thirty or so…
Here in this little town in Pennsylvania where I spend half the week and the whole long summer, we are urged to buy local. This is a pleasure, not a duty or a difficulty. The rewards are multiple: sticking it to the multinationals, high quality merchandise, real personal exchanges. Becoming known. The place in town…
Mrs. Greed had been married for forty years, her husband the cuckold of all time. A homely man with a notable fortune, he escorted her on errands in the neighborhood. It was a point of honor with Mrs. Greed to say she would never leave him. No matter if her affection for him was surpassed…
Now Mike Fuselier would sometimes watch Paul Calder in Moonie’s, chasing Wild Turkey with Pabst, and once Mike had seen him snoring out in the sun at Royce-Anne Park, under the wwii memorial. Often he saw Calder simply wandering the streets of West Medora with a confused, absent expression, as if she was something he’d…
To Alex"s personal horror and professional embarrassment, the Clement College alumni magazine ran an obnoxiously chipper blurb that September, in a special, blue-tinted box. She read it out loud to Malcolm on the phone: Fowl Play Assistant Professor Alex Moore has taught Samuel Taylor Coleridge"s "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" quite a few times since…
Back home where Paul’s mother lived it flooded Friday night. When his catering shift was over, at one a.m., he got his backpack from the servery and saw that she had called. On the message her voice was dull and strained, emptied by hopeless labor. She’d been bailing out the basement since eight, until her…
Tommy, when he was alive and could speak clearly without spit gathering in a big drip at his chin, would kiss Dee’s nose and warn her not to waste her time trying to figure it out, why it was so big. “Just love the nose,” Tommy’d say. “Love it and love the lips the same….
Months after it has all come out, Annie will go on thinking about Baby R and Mondo and how it could just as easily have been her. And yet, somehow Annie had always been able to slip away, hardly aware that she was doing so. Today, she was walking into the locker room,…
It’s because you’re a woman that you don’t want me to die, Tayari says. On their way home, the No. 6 train sidling its slow way through the South Bronx, she has her head in his lap, her long gangly legs splayed out over three seats, fingers hooked into his dreadlocks. She likes to…
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