Celestine Truxa was born in Salzburg on the eve of Metternich’s coronation as prince. According to the midwife, her mother split up the middle like a birch tree hit by lightning, managing to stay alive just long enough to see her daughter’s face lodged in the crook of her husband’s arm, eloquent of birth and…
I n the future, everyone will be someone else. At her school, the future had been discussed as if it were a definite sort of business, with tangible boundaries like an island nation. It was a place you could rocket to or grope towards in a state of anticipation. But if thinking about your actual…
They head south, and as they move out from under the dense Baltimore sky toward air and ocean and hot sun, Flo and Matthew beg their mother, Marie-Claude, to tell stories. Flo loves the ones about when Marie-Claude was as young as she is now, and Matthew wants to hear, over and over, how he…
Alvin Boudreaux had outlived his neighbors. His asbestos-siding house was part of a tiny subdivision built in the 1950’s, when everybody had children, a single-lane driveway, a rotating TV antenna, and a picnic table out back. Nowadays he sat on his little porch and watched the next wave of families occupy the neighborhood, each taking…
All week the heat has been killing. Foolish to walk the distance to the credit union even so early in the morning, imagining you can beat the worst of it. Think of the walk back, the pavement baking, not a tree for blocks. Foolish-aKenneth word. Don’t be foolish, Marilyn, take the Volvo. This, as so…
I am not ashamed to admit that I like being held with my back to her-her hands on my stomach, arms arrowing down my hips, fingers tracing the slightest underside of my jeans. I am not ashamed to admit that the absence of a face, the surprise of not being able to see, to predict…
from Citizens Review Then there was the police chief’s daughter, always bad news. Like tonight-another roasting summer night, air conditioners not quite keeping up-she sat alone at the bar, tapping her chipped fingernails against a glass. She took a last drag on the cigarette the fag gave her, a lousy, tasteless, low-tar wimp of a…
She draws. She draws a door. On the windowpane in breath. Breathes on the glass and draws. A door, an O spells polio. Six years old. She dreams. Walks with her father again. River of glass. To the river of glass collecting bits of this and that to examine later under the microscope. To hold….
How many times since Elise’s death had her husband, Mitch, said numbly, Oh Christ, I can’t believe she’s gone, I don’t know what to do. And Joan replied helplessly, squeezing his hand, I know! I know. Of course, there wouldn’t be one-a wake. The deceased hadn’t been Catholic. Hadn’t been brought up in any church,…
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