Elna had once said that beautifying was nothing more than grabbing Mother Nature by the throat and showing her who was boss. When Shelly arrived for her appointment, her friend was vigorously at work on an alabaster-complexioned teenager. Testimonies of terse, coiled ringlets spiraled downward at the girl’s ears and the back of her neck….
By folding his legs so that his feet touched his thighs, Matt was able to completely immerse himself in hot water-water he had paid for shilling by shilling, dropping small English coins into a rusted metal box one by one to keep the water flowing until the bathtub was full. The tiny washroom was freezing…
They grew up playing hockey on Everett Pond, long after supper, after homework and Bonanza or Laugh-In or My Three Sons, after they said good night and went to their rooms yawning as if headed to sleep. The grown-ups pretended not to know about the rendezvous at the rink, but some of the fathers had,…
June 1973 Early on the morning of Alice’s wedding, when I was nine, I woke to hear the front door slamming into the quiet, and I got out of my bed and went to the window. Standing on tiptoes, feet bare against floor planks chilled by the air conditioner, the breeze running up my…
Jen and I were driving through New Mexico with her father, who was a retired insurance guy just a few years older than me, a tall, thin guy with a swatch of white hair that slipped across his scalp as if it had fallen there from a tree. Jen thought this trip would be a…
Heitman, the queerbait, the insane, is my tentmate. Again. Porter, the fat kid who cries a lot, cried again this morning, saying he didn’t want to tent with Heitman ever again. Last night Heitman put ticks on Porter’s eyelashes while he slept. This morning our Scoutmaster, Casper, had to pluck them off with tweezers, since…
In the late winter of 1985, John Rogan had been a surgeon for almost thirty-five years, and though still active and vital, a tall, erect, white-haired man, with a reputation for audacity matched by success, he was thinking of retiring. His older brother, also a surgeon, had apparently committed suicide the year before. He had…
The Andersons’ house perched on the corner of our block like a dinosaur, with wings and a tail that spread into the lot behind it, growing in sections as the family increased. Mrs. Anderson had five children by her first husband, who died in bed of a heart attack the morning of their tenth anniversary….
‘Yde’s the name. Edward ‘yde . . . or Hyde, as educated folk like yourself would have it. That’s my real name, although for the past fifty years, Hyde has stayed hidden under the moniker of Edward Layman. To the good people here in the West Midlands, I’m just Layman or Ed, no different from…
No products in the cart.