The note was slipped to me on Wednesday, July 20th, at two minutes before three. I know the exact time because I happened to be staring at my watch, wondering if Dr. V. would be running late today, as she sometimes did, when the double doors burst open, and Peacock Throne walked out. I called…
On the morning of July 23, 1921, my parents, Cowley and Elizabeth Russet, died in the crash of a zeppelin at the fairgrounds in Fleming Park. They had each paid fifty cents to ride in the gondola, to float and drift over Halifax, the harbor, then back to Fleming Park. That day, I had been…
A duppy by default, he was drowned, but he came out of the sea. Never dead, he said, though who would believe him? Life raft, he explained, but his employers-a graying pair, nondescript Anglicans who already spoke of the Will of God to describe his disappearance-now spoke of that same Will to describe his appearance….
1. Those Absent Any reasonable baby shower would have properly culminated in the videocorder with the instant playback feature. The present was addressed to The Formerly Thin Addie Ling from her three tactless brothers, and arrived suspiciously wrapped in a brown paper grocery bag. There was no box or warranty card. If the camera was…
Bobby Bell’s fingers numbered four to a hand. His thumb and pointer were identical to God’s, but the other two were just fleshy stubs, stunted and fused on each slender paw. He was a dumb kid, besides, if progress in school is a fair measure. He sized me up my first week in town, then…
The organist pumped out the blurred tones of “Just as I Am,” the song sinking like a rusted hook in Jack’s chest. Jack locked his ankles, clenched his knees to the underside of the slick oak pew as his grandfather, Emmett, snored quietly beside him. Stop it. Please stop it, Jack said to the whirling…
The young woman in 15f stood looking out her window. Thousands of other windows-wavy rectangles, shaken towels of light-seemed to signal in code, You are not alone. Of course, she was not alone, anyway. Margaret turned back to the living room, where her Nebraska mother was sitting up very straight. “Twenty-eight is not old,” Margaret…
A turquoise silk scarf, elegantly long, and narrow; so delicately threaded with pale gold and silver butterflies, you might lose yourself in a dream contemplating it, imagining you’re gazing into another dimension or another time in which the heraldic butterflies are living creatures with slow, pulsing wings. Eleven years old, I was searching for a…
1 We got up at dawn, ignored the yolky sun, loaded our navy-blue Austin with suitcases, and then drove straight to the coast, stopping only on the verge of Sarajevo, so I could pee. I sang communist songs the entire journey: songs about mournful mothers looking through graves for their dead sons; songs about the…
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