It was the night Johnny came back to town, one of those pent-up summer nights when the sky trembled heavy with unshed moisture, weighing us down, the burden of it pressing us into the dust, and we wanted to scream let go! but heaven wouldn’t unleash that water, held it fist-tight, just out of reach,…
We’re having a late lunch, five women, widows now, who have been meeting once a month for forty years. “Dress-up time” we call it because when you are our ages—86, 87, 91, and 93– few events encourage one to don a cape, drape a rope of pearls around a neck, or apply eye shadow if…
On the line, I run a double-forklift. It’s a lot like a regular forklift, but the forks both spread out on either side and when they fan out, you have to catch the grooves of both pallets just so at the same time. And you have to do it FAST. Also, the balance point is…
Unfinished Equations
I stand at the kitchen window, calculating the parabolic arc a murmuration of birds makes against the ridge of conifers. He coalesces at my elbow, tipping his moon-face up to me, to the scratch of blue sky beyond the box of this house. No longer a boy-shaped smudge or a specter. You’re supposed to find…
Odds and Ends
It was supposed to be chess club, but instead, it was Gambler’s Anonymous, and that’s what you get in Moline. That’s what you get in church basements. It might be fried chicken, or it might be stale donuts, and I should have left right then, but I didn’t. I stayed. I don’t know why I…
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