On freezing winter nights, the boys had two chores before going to sleep. They had to tie the blankets down to the bed frames so that they would not toss their covers off in their dreams and get frostbite on their hands and feet. And they had to empty their chamber pot so that what…
He wasn’t her first lover, or her best lover, or even her lover at first. He was too gangly, for one thing. There was nothing but leg connecting his chin to his shoes, so it was awkward for her always to be craning up to look at him. Except when he sat down; then, because…
1. Savior The pustules on his back: volcanic almost in how they erupted, subsided, erupted. Closing my eyes, I would trace my fingertips along his skin, feeling the circular, hard shapes and slick, raised peaks. I wondered if they hurt when I touched him, how it felt to be so broken out, not only on…
According to city ordinance, the Buena Gente cantina should have been closed an hour ago. But the proprietress, a charitable soul whose life imitated the generosity of the earth, who believed in the rights of the people, and who didn’t mind defying a silly law in the name of good business, stayed open late because…
Last week my head was too small. This week, it is too big. My face in the mirror is a picture of dismay. If I try to correct the disproportion with baggy clothes, I will look not only moonheaded but squat, Charlie Brown-esque. When the head is too small, I fare no better: tight clothes…
You’re a beautiful woman, sweetheart,” Edwin Friend began. His girlfriend, Bobbie Kaplowitz, paid attention: Edwin rarely spoke up and complimented her. He tipped his chair against her sink and glanced behind him, but the drainboard wasn’t piled so high that the back of his head would start an avalanche today. He took a decisive drink…
I think at last I will give up the Blacksmith House. I’ve liked the place since college, when my best friend, Celia, and I would meet for coffee in those frugal, scrubbed pine rooms, full of the feel of long-dead Puritans, which we were not. You could smoke in public in those days, and we…
Drink your cod-liver oil or the moon will eat you, my grandmother used to say. Well, I didn’t drink my cod-liver oil and the moon didn’t eat me. But one night I refused to drink my milk when I was visiting my grandmother, who lived in a white-frame farmhouse on the outskirts of Bloomington, and…
They heard their mother yell their father’s name, and came from their beds barefoot and squinting. Jeff Driver was in the kitchen. He was crying, and he told them that the bridge on Cascom Mountain Road had washed out. He looked at Kate’s mother and said her name, “Carey.” Then he looked at Kate and…
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