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…
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…
The shelled corn bin was like a huge box over the alleyway of the corncrib. Millions of crisp and yellow corn kernels, ten feet deep, and ten feet square at the top. The boys liked to dive into it, letting it sting their hands and faces as they squirmed until they almost disappeared into the…
Libby killed herself just before the holidays, and so the flamingo stayed where it had been hidden-in the rotten shed at the edge of our yard. I’d often sneak out to look at it. The flamingo seemed incredibly big, its wooden neck reaching up past the shelves of potting soil and garden shears. It stood…
Listen to me, said the boys’ grandfather. When I was a boy, you had to be smart or you could get hurt. Their grandfather had already sat down in his old swivel chair. He lit one of his cigars and took a big puff. The boys made themselves comfortable on the floor. We milked by…
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