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…
You know, there is this amazing thing that happens when you begin to create a common history with someone. Each detail is fascinating. You could just go to a mall and hang near the fountain in the atrium, and you’ll find yourself going over that time as if it were the Zapruder film. -Mark Leyner…
You say there’s no time like the present. But what is the present here? I’ve watched TV for ages and seen movies since I was three. TV’s daily life and movies are a communal fantasy. Today is in color, yesterday’s in black and white, and there’s no agreement about tomorrow. I hear music everywhere, and…
The room was alive. I knew it better than my body. The whole house sighed and shuddered, breathing inaudibly through its doors and windows. In and out, in and out I went, and one existence melted like snow into another. The sun was fierce and crazy. I cooled in green pools or under the shade…
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