Fiction |
from Monsters Like Us
“Viktor will remember France as if he were looking through binoculars, just held the wrong way around. The numbers in the lift of the Clara Schumann Hospital are absolutely clear as he goes up the five floors to Surgery II.”
Fiction |
“Cape Flyaway”
“How long had they been searching for land on this voyage? His eyes ached and burned from strain and wind and salt and sun. And he had seen it, he knew, he had seen land …”
Fiction |
“Something Special,” “My Mother the Realtor,” “The Salesman Grows Sad” & “The Salesman Gets A Suit” from The House of Grana Padano
“‘Beautiful people become beautiful by living in these houses,’ she would say. At home, late in the evening, she’d tell me, ‘The business is drying up.'”
Fiction |
“Creation Myth”
“When we were small, barely out of babyhood ourselves, the nights we slept at Grandmother’s house at the edge of the blue-black woods, she sent us to sleep with the story of how babies came to be born of women.”
Fiction |
“The Last Golden Hour”
“We wasted the day looking after my oldest son who does not want to be looked after. Your unbonded stepson. He wrecked his car on a Kentucky backroad. His girlfriend clawed his face. Cuffed, no charges filed.”
Fiction |
“An Ingenue Attends the Freshman Formal” & “Tally of a Loss”
“9: my age when you taught me to save myself for the right person
15: my age when I thought he was right
15 ½: my age when he wasn’t”
Fiction |
“Invasion Theory”
“The only transformation that allows for true escape is the transformation not of the one who flees but of the one who chases.”
Fiction |
from Life Sciences, a novel by Joy Sorman
“… she knows perfectly well that this malady didn’t land on her randomly, that it didn’t come out of nowhere, but from a slowly formed bed of history and time, from layers of pathological strata …”
Fiction |
“Apartment” & “A Record of Her Months”
“In October, she tried to escape: the gate, ladder and over the back wall of the hospital. The first time, the nurses understood and told her to quit it. The second time, they limited her hours outside. The third, they called her husband.”
Fiction |
“Spoons and Thimbles” and “Coital Headache”
“… and if she finds herself in a dance hall of only ladies, Prince’s “Kiss” is going to play, and if “Kiss” plays, she’s going to take all six feet of her taut self to the floor and grind against everything her evangelical mother warned her about …”
Fiction |
“The Three Trials of Silent Lady“
“You could catch a ton of codfish within sight of Cape Cod in the early Eighties — which was why my shipmate Chris and I stepped aboard the fifty-foot school-bus-yellow gillnetter Silent Lady late one winter afternoon …”
Fiction |
“Poifect”
“Martin’s wife crawls onto the lap of the politician. Martin’s wife feels that she and Martin must become more civic-minded. They are local business owners, after all. And all politics is local.”
Fiction |
“Virus Child” and “Open Letter to My Grifter”
“I don’t remember my past bodies, or how I was swindled into ending up in this one. How I owe you essential parts of this one; how I’ll pay for this one.”
Fiction |
“Sebastian”
“When his mother tucked him into bed those nights, she said, Be sure not to get sand in your sheets, did you wash it from your fingernails and hair? to which Sebi would reply, Mama, I stayed on the tram today, and she would kiss his cheek.”
Fiction |
“The Queen of Language”
“Valentina wears the standard issue orange jumpsuit with “Probation” across the back, and when she sees me enter, she waves and smiles as though we’d run into one another at a coffee shop. She has run away, been re-arrested, and bounced from the streets to the Halls many times.”