I was born in the Tuscan city of Siena, and among my earliest and fondest memories is having sat long ago on my father’s lap at a table outside the Piazza del Campo, with the Fountain of Gaia gurgling nearby, watching, wide-eyed, as Papa’s pencil turned blank paper into cartoon animals on my behalf. His…
A hornet’s nest hung above one of the French doors that led to the Quists’ back terrace. Harrison Quist first noticed it when he took out the garbage one Thursday morning in early June. He told his wife, Marcie, about it as he dressed for work, calling it a bee’s nest, and telling her to…
They had started out too late. This is what she tells herself as she sits in the dark on the old screened porch and drinks a glass of wine. Terrible wine—white, at least a week old, at room temperature. It had been sitting, recorked, in the box of last-minute things they’d brought up with them…
Year after year, rain enters your diary, as the Japanese say, and an exhaustive sadness prevails. And then suddenly one day, you find the love of your life. Happenstance or blind luck; what does it matter, as long as two people meet and life is lived more intensely for all that. Because nothing brings such…
His parents placed him on a Greyhound with twenty dollars, a plastic bag full of asparagus from the small garden out back, a satchel containing his meager summer clothes, and a letter. The asparagus he tossed in a trashcan when the bus made its first stop in Pennsylvania. The letter he opened before they’d even…
His parents placed him on a Greyhound with twenty dollars, a plastic bag full of asparagus from the small garden out back, a satchel containing his meager summer clothes, and a letter. The asparagus he tossed in a trashcan when the bus made its first stop in Pennsylvania. The letter he opened before they’d even…
After two years in Europe, fighting in the war, Frederick returned to the family farm outside of Ipswich. It was June of 1945. People commented on how much he’d changed. His eyes, which had once been full of feeling, were now entirely empty of emotion. Looking into them was like staring at a desert or…
On a Friday, during his inspection of the sludge containment tank at the East Winder Municipal Wastewater Treatment Plant, Calvin’s foot slipped off the catwalk—it was raining, the metal was wet—and his left work boot and left leg became submerged up to the knee in treated sewage. “Whoops,” said the plant manager beside him. The…
He managed the walk to Main Street, three blocks, two long avenues, and didn’t worry about how he looked—a big whitehead poking along the sidewalk. Things were getting better, not that Tiny knew the absolute right moment to leave his house, because out the back door his garden merged with theirs, and the neighbors might…
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