A sheep has escaped from the abattoir. It’s loose on the railway line that runs along the coast to the harbor and they’ve stopped the trains. You hear on the radio, the activists are out with placards, Meat is Murder, Ban Sheep Ships and the like. The police have been...
He’d be back soon, and she was glad to be cold. From the passenger’s seat, she’d watched him float up the dark path. His footsteps remained, half-inch depressions in new snow. It fell—blue-tinted gobs of it, the kind that made children’s mouths water. Sticky...
My father tells me the constant rush of water through our town is the whoosh of the world going round. The snow in the mountains never stops falling, never stops melting, never stops raging into the valley. Stern and roiling. Like the white noise of God and reason,...
1. During the space race days your parents sip Maxwell House in the morning, Beefeater before dark. Through bedroom walls you hear talk of traveling to the moon, Viet Cong soldiers, and Brezhnev. How it’s another Bay of Pigs and screw that. Over Sloppy Joe casserole...
It is a cast-iron frying pan filled with cigarette butts. The handle is just the right size for my hand and just out of reach on the freezer. It is an ashtray. That’s all it is, and I don’t want it. “You don’t want that,” Momma has told me many times, so I try not to....
I’d use a soda siphon at cocktail hour, and you’d only know I’m speaking when my chin quivers. And it wouldn’t feel like I was playing a solo eternal game of, ‘would I rather’. I wouldn’t need to pass the days until I see you again—until I lift you sleepy from our...
During a commercial, I ask you to tell me about nights in the jungle. We are blue and then white and then green—the quick, flickering light of television on bare skin. Rain forest, you say. I like jungle better. I mouth it into the lip of my beer. The way it digs like...
You don’t remember Grammy saying the words, although you were there. You were the baby. You’ve heard the story a million times, if you heard it once. “We don’t boil babies,” is the punch line—at least the way your mother tells it. Your mother is a great storyteller....
First, blanch the peaches. Run them under cold water to peel their skin away. Feel the flesh underneath. This is the last thing your mother taught you— get your house in order. The heat is urgent and unforgiving, but soon you will be far from here. The storm will hit...
Jack is sixteen when he sees Marie the first time, then 84 when he sees her again, though he doesn’t know he saw her before, and those caring for him—tolerating him—wouldn’t believe him anyway, for the brain is falling away from the man, who’s always looking...
The passion with which she took to the house and garden surprised him. She told him her grandmother taught her to cook when she was a girl. She’d just been waiting for a kitchen. She cooked hard, rolling pastry, stirring sauces with a wooden spoon, punching down yeast...
Five hungry blonde girls, sitting pertly on their haunches, holding court in the lounge. You all live on the same floor in the freshman dorm, go to the same classes, but still you take their orders. Marcie, the leader, asks, “You don’t mind, do you?” Of course not....