I'm teaching my neighbor's six-year-old the subtle art of deception—how to catch minnows empty-handed in the brook out back. The trick, I explain, is to work both hands together, fooling the fish into sensing a threat with one, sweeping it backwards into the other. As I draw one out of the water, I ask him…
The sweatings and the fevers stop, the throat that was unsound is sound, the lungs of the consumptive are resumed. . . . —Walt Whitman, “The Sleepers” 1. What I could not accept was how much space his body was taking with it: for instance, the space where I was standing, the dazed fluorescence of…
X could make a face like a fish. Standing on the sidewalk, he threw underwater kisses at a store window where he saw himself. Someone thought he was crazy. But X had a theory that had to do with memory, change, music, and danger. Everything he remembered turned purple in his mind, or it remained…
Phantom of the Opera and Frankenstein, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Last Man on Earth—at fourteen, I could have been the last for all they cared, still no luck with girls—and so spent each Saturday afternoon at the Towne with blacks and whites I had fallen in love with, at home with the…
I Taking my time, literal as I seemed, crazy enough for silly disputes, actually Asiatically sorry-eyed, reconciled finally to the fact that the January snow behind the silver shed dating back, the sudden sense you've seen it all before appeared to take shape. For the likes of me the weather wasn't any theory, only conflagrations…
The house is a sort of airy structure that moves about on the breath of time. —G. Bachelard The greying bard of Camden sits where two walls meet, afraid of light and sound as it comes in the window: the hearty noise of children playing and women calling out to their mates as they trudge…
There are certain lies I need to tell you. I hope that they are successful. Not that the lies are successful, but what I am saying behind the lies will be. There are certain things I want you to know about me. Not that I am good and kind, I am those things and I…
On the J train, a gun swung toward the wide-eyed messenger with a crippled hand, the gunman a burly man with sunglasses tells witnesses “Be cool,” the bullet shattering a window after ripping the heart apart. At the Canal Street station, slowly up the steps, head down, he's vanished into Chinatown. Rush hour. Chilled September…
1. After the Reformation had settled the loamy soil and the lettuce-green fields of dollars, the clouds drifted away, light fell on the grass blooming from the sunny snow, and a red barn stood out on a hill with scattered hemlocks and white pine and the shut gate of a picket fence. * * * From the…
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