Alice Leung has discovered the secrets of bats: how they see without seeing, how they own darkness, as we own light. She walks the halls with a black headband across her eyes, keening a high C- cheat cheat cheat cheat cheat cheat-never once veering off course, as if drawn by an invisible thread. Echolocation, she…
In our battle against the Beatles, it was my uncle Willie who threw the first punch, and for that, he said, he should have been knighted. I didn’t argue. We fought them in 1966, the year they played Araneta Coliseum in Manila, to a crowd of over one hundred thousand people. Their visit was quick;…
In August, the summer after her ninth-grade year, the girl-pudgy, moonfaced, with dull brown hair and new breasts-met the man who became her first husband. Before that, she’d been seeing a tall boy she danced with at junior high graduation, starting with a concentric-circle wheel-dance the chaperons employed to pull the boys and girls from…
When they returned home that evening, the cat was outside. She hissed and bolted from the porch at their approach, not the least bit interested in going inside, where they had left her. The play they had seen had been by e. e. cummings, enacted entirely upon a stage floor slanted surreally towards the audience….
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…
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