According to my diary, it was on May 29, 1998, that I received an invitation to the Séance Book Club. The letter from a Mrs. Lisette Visser read in part, “We would appreciate your being with us on eight consecutive evenings, during which we will summon the characters from your novel, The Museum Guard, and…
Truth lies within a little and certain compass. –Viscount Bolingbroke It took my Aunt Toby twenty years to profit enough from fictohistoriographia to give up teaching, to release the two of us from New York, to realize her dream to buy a house on Lake Piscataqua in New England. But at last, the year…
File 2011/Electronic Copy of Revenant Composition, “The Ghost Writer,” in Word DOCX (Former Sex: Female; Deceased: circa 2011) The word ghost derives from the Anglo-Saxon gast, breath or spirit. So to “give up the ghost” is to die. At the same time, in being relinquished by the body, the ghost escapes the confines of mortality:…
After the winter of the coma when his wife sued for divorce, after the year of weekly grand mal seizures, Isaac had a job. Now he wanted his sons back—Ethan, who just turned five, and Paul, three and a half. The boys observed their father, if somewhat coolly, from photos posted on the wall behind…
It is a fine ring of white plaster and red bricks. I saw Juan Belmonte, bullfight idol, here once…when he came down to watch the bulls brought in. This night the fodder for tomorrow’s show was being brought in, too. Files of men, arms in the air. —Jay Allen, “Slaughter of 4,000 at Badajoz,…
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…
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