Fiction |
“A Collision”
“A tall short-haired blond woman got out of the Honda who looked familiar, vaguely, and then both were standing in the cold in the alley, and first one said, Are you okay? and then the other said it and Caroline said, My puppy dog’s a bit rattled, and the other was so sorry.”
Fiction |
“Woman, Blue”
“The voices had crushed him once, with their weight and numbers, with the fears and anxieties and regrets and the losses they spoke of. He wouldn’t let that happen again. He wouldn’t go back to the hospital.”
Fiction |
“After School Special”
“Because of its location in the back of a mostly evacuated mini-shopping strip, The Falls was always close to empty — the perfect rendezvous point for students joined in something, Liza put it as ‘beyond mere cliquishness.'”
Fiction |
“Walking on Our Knees Backwards Home”
“… let me assure you the pain eventually will subside, but the memories will continue to haunt. Even after 65 years, my imagination wades to the bank of the Tallahatchie River where my son died.”
Fiction |
“Infection Control”
“The citrus scent hit her nostrils, the smell of long ago summer days while polishing the big cherry dining table to the sound of Little Beth and her friends chattering outside while they played four square on the driveway.”
Fiction |
“A Terrible Gift”
“I’d always had trouble dedicating myself to one mode for long. I oscillated between the abstract, the realist, the symbolic. Beyond the embarrassment, it was a source of fear that I’d never be more than a tinkerer, a dilettante.”
Fiction |
“Fengshui”
“When Ying died of an unknown disease at age 36, her only son, a thin and short 12-year old boy, could neither afford to hire anyone to move her body to the family graveyard, nor do the job by himself.”
Fiction |
“Family Portrait with Trees”
“From the window, a girl looks back at herself. She is six. There is a storm in her bedroom: thunder, his breathing near her ear.”
Fiction |
“I Saw Elvis in Palm Springs”
“Claudia was in Palm Springs because she’d made a fairly lucrative commercial deal with a Japanese yogurt company and wanted to go somewhere alone where she could pretend she’d come by the money in a more respectable way. Like phishing or selling drugs.”
Fiction |
“The Peshaman Fragments”
“When at rest, the mouth often does not relax but returns to a puckered, circular kissing shape that suggests it is at once both open and closed, an orifice of both inbound and outbound potential.”
Fiction |
“Facts About Bald Men,” “Up On the Roof,” “The Bald Man and His Twin,” “Return of the Kleptomaniac” & “Prayer for Hair”
“I stole the last hair from a bald man. The blackish-gray hair was surprisingly long, maybe three feet in length, and had wrapped around his head several times and dangled down his back.”
Fiction |
“Adventure”
“We watched the dog for a little while. He peed again, then we got back to our activities inside Vee’s house. We did not know how to play with a dog, what he was for. Later I walked home and wanted a dog for myself, but not one just to look at.”
Fiction |
“Otra Noche En Miami”
“Santi and I came here — I mean Miami, not Mango’s — to be queer as fuck. Queer as possible before being shipped back to Honduras, closeted and impossible.”
Fiction |
“We Are the Daughters of the Witches You Never Noticed”
“It might as well have been a wild shadow, a melancholy tone from a dream that echoed into waking life. And that echo had been growing louder.”
Fiction |
“Maestro” and “Through”
“The number of firepit watchers increased and it struck me that more than a handful seemed disapproving of my presence. Had some mention of me turned up in the county newspaper concerning one of my interests?”