Mrs. Venkataraman had never seen a black man before. There they were in the arrival lounge at Murtala Muhammad Airport, with their coal-black skins and eyes, pawing through their passports, looking for the residence visas her husband’s university had obtained for them, shaking their heads and laughing loudly, saying Eh-hehn Eh-hehn over and over again….
I stood on Mr. Silvia’s porch with my last thirty-six dollars rolled in a rubber band tucked between breast and belly fat. I remembered the house from when I was a kid. Back then it was a gap-toothed barn where we played while birds flew in and out above us. Now it was a…
from House of Widows Like most men under the right circumstances, my father could walk on water. In fact, he did it often, and sometimes he took me along. Together we stood on the frozen whitecaps of Cape Ann looking back at the lights of our town on the Massachusetts north shore. Even half a…
A Romance Novel in Ten Short Chapters Chapter One One day—taken by the lilt of his wrists and the most beautiful hands she had ever seen on a man—she impetuously threw in her lot with a deaf and dumb mechanic who’d been deaf and dumb from birth. She fell in love as she was watching…
She is standing in the doorway of the barn loft, swaying backwards and forwards. Both her hands are over her head and flat against the inside of the lintel; her heels come off the floor on her forward motion, and she keeps her toes down on her backward motion, curling them around the rough…
Clare can’t walk. She has sprained her ankle so badly, it’s no better than broken. Marble step, wet leaf, a moment of distraction, and she was pulled up, several feet above the landing and dropped like a bag of laundry, her fingers sliding down the wet iron banister, her feet bending and flopping like…
In Spain I never rode the Talgo. The Talgo was the express train from Barcelona to Paris, but I never went to Barcelona. This was years before the Olympics, and Franco was finally dead. The white gorilla was still around and all the Gaudi, but I never made it there. Partly it was the expense….
When do you begin traveling? When your airplane lifts off the ground? When you leave your house for the road? When you pack? When the plan first comes to mind? When you admit to how restless and ill at ease, even murderous, you feel at home? When you take your first steps? When you…
Or: The Story Behind the Failure of the 2003 Radio Salsa 98.1 Semi-Annual Cuban and/or Puerto Rican Heritage Festival The church is quiet except for the nun’s approaching footsteps. You could imagine the sound of the soft soles of her shoes scuffing down the center aisle, coming towards the last pew, barely growing louder as…
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