He said he thought it would be easy. He’d been dying for such a long time. Twelve years to be exact. He remembered the day the doctor told him: a Wednesday. The color of the light: white. The outside temperature: chilly for southern California. The look on Sukie’s...
The dusty yard feels cool, though the day has been unseasonably warm. On the far side of the rusted chain-link fence trots a dirty white dog, some mangy stray. Its shadow is long in the setting sun’s light. Its shaggy head sways from side to side as its nose travels...
Mount Carmel Road was a quiet dead end in the north section of town. And in the middle of the night when the war in the Far East was over and the radios blared out the news, all the lights went on in all the houses on that blind street, except where the card game was...
“You know,” I said to Gwen between the snores of some guy I didn’t know, “I wasn’t always a literary celebrity.” She sat next to me on the balcony painting her nails for the fourth time that night. Well, morning now—we’d been awake all night again. Staccato,...
It was the pounding of it, more than its liquidity, that demanded my attention, but the rain was sufficiently wet to soak me from head to toe in less than a minute. It wasn’t unusual to get “lightning-raid” storms at this time of year, usually around eight in the...
Joseph M. Schuster. In 2004, Literary Awards Program judge Richard Currey saw a remarkable talent and, with two others, placed Schuster’s entry, A Saint in the Family, solidly in the winner’s circle. Now, this year, Schuster has released his first book...
