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...
I grew up in the American West and reside here, still. In the West, story is the amniotic fluid from which we are thrust. We may not later recognize its taste or scent or syrupy weight in our lungs, but neither are we inclined to distinguish the acrid pine in the...
Her shoulders were like poured cream, translucent, the blue veins swimming just underneath. The sharp little bones a magnificent scaffolding. I always used to kiss her on her shoulder. When she got older, I just knew she’d shrug me off, roll her eyes and say “Mom” in...
“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...
