In late afternoon I sit on the porch, which is mostly rotted to the ground. The screen door’s got cardboard laid in and the rock chimney leaks mortar like a pastry filling. The roof is more sky than shingle. At sixteen years old I wanted to be far away, and by seventeen I was long…
Most said the scout had discovered Rosa Dean buying toilet paper at the Super Thrifty. Some said she’d been at the Lucky Mart, while others said she’d been eating fried clams with her friends at McManahan’s Fish Fry. Of course the people of Apple Island, Massachusetts, had known about Rosa Dean’s beauty for years. They’d…
1st Johanna just wants to fuck baseball players. Baseball. She harbors no lust for the thunder boys of basketball. “Freaks of nature, glandular giants, scary,” she explains. “It’d be awful, like having sex with a kayak.” Football players don’t arouse her either. “God, no! Sadistic ogres. They should be out tolling cathedral bells or guarding…
On Good Friday, the day she suggested the Easter parade, Linda Hartley was following advice she had given a reader from Petaluma, Texas, in one of her recent columns. “We should all wear bonnets,” she said to the three men sitting next to her at the bar, “and walk up and down this block.” She…
While I was at the Albuquerque airport bar-pueblo turquoise and sandstone-waiting to meet my girlfriend, a woman offered to buy me a drink. She was better than good-looking. We each ordered a frozen margarita, did a salud, and I walked her politely to her gate, and she kissed my lips as she went to the…
Carleyville left late because of the rain. That morning the phone had finally been disconnected, after a ridiculous argument with the phone company, when the supervisor he was finally connected with agreed to disconnect after asking a series of questions he could not possibly answer. With his credit card, his “code” was his mother’s maiden…
Lily Stark’s mother had just said the facts of the murder were too horrible to repeat. But Lily’s father insisted a story as awful as how Mr. Sam was slaughtered would teach Lily something about this world. “I don’t care about the world you even mean,” Lily said. For a long time Lily had been…
On the evening of D-day, the pub is packed. It’s a close June night in the Welsh hills, with the threat of thunder. The radios of the village cough with static. The Quarryman’s Arms, with the tallest aerial for miles around, is a scrum of bodies, all waiting to hear the Prime Minister’s broadcast. There’s…
Jane and Evan moved to a small city in eastern Ohio and rented an old house on half an acre surrounded by a stone wall. Jobs came easily to them. People could see by their open and unlined faces that something good was happening in their lives. Evan went to work for an insurance agency,…
No products in the cart.