Quarter is in the house, in the wider sense of the word that includes the S-2 bus, so I don’t have to check my watch or scam off of someone else’s before going back to my book on why the Anasazi disappeared. I know what time it is: between eight forty-nine and eight...
“Before you were born, I went to stay at a convent in the northern woods,” my mother says. We are seated at a window table in a neocafé, the kind that doesn’t sell giant iced-coffee drinks with fat straws. Instead, we sip tiny cups of searing espresso that require...
Watch an expert carpenter mitre crown moulding, and you get the effect of Perle Besserman’s 2013 novel about turning points which deftly veers around as much of a corner as did The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde in 1886 for fans of Robert Louis Stevenson’s...
Grandfather served in World War II on the islands of Okinawa, and was damn proud of it. He talked on-and-on about “those rascally slants” and “those French faggots” and how they owed their very existence to the pride and endurance of the Great Country. Grandfather...
When I was nineteen, someone knocked on the door of my basement dorm room, and I opened it, ducking under the exposed water pipe on the ceiling, to find Bob. Blond, smiling Bob in a bow tie, a junior boy I didn’t talk to. He cleared his throat, then extended me an...
The rich customers always looked at my brother with scared-shitless-eyes. Nothing in their pristine lives could have prepared them for what they were seeing. I mean my brother was huge, about 6’4, with wild auburn hair and a thick unkempt beard filling his pale face....
