Her kitchen is filled with the neighbors’ dishes—all well-meaning, pity-stained, uncleaned. She can’t quite think, so she shuffles about the house, marveling at the strangeness. Touching the bill pile, a bruised spot in the oak banister, his fleece jacket on a coat rack, the cannon-shaped back of a wedding gift mixer, the crumbling scone on…
I am sitting behind a desk, not my desk, maybe your desk, watching the clock. That woman who works in the next cubicle has her radio tuned to NPR. “All Things Considered” has come on. This is good, this means that we are getting toward the end of things. The work day, I mean. On…
The summer I first discovered how it feels to suffer in love, I worked for a local newspaper, selling subscriptions over the phone. It was a miserable job, and I was lousy at it. I stumbled through my script, apologizing too often, agreeing with people on the other end of the line that it was…
“Ma’am? You can’t open the windows, sorry.” Coolly she turned to the boy. Prissy Mexican kid, wearing white-boy wire-rim glasses, who’d brought up her single lightweight suitcase she’d have preferred to have brought herself, to save a tip. But at the hotel check-in downstairs the suave, brisk young woman behind the counter had finessed Kathryn,…
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,…
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