Tim Melley
Tim Melley lives in Cincinnati and teaches American literature at Miami University of Ohio. He is the author of Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Cornell University Press), and his stories have appeared in the Threepenny Review, Columbia, the Mississippi Review, and Epoch. He has also read his work from The Sun on Public Radio International’s This American Life.
Overflow
On the day my mom got her last chemo treatment, I fished from the dike of the Intake Reservoir. I wasn’t supposed to be fishing. I was supposed to be delivering the Hawthorne Pennysaver. My summer job was to place a crisp Pennysaver at each of the 465 doorways of the Pleasant Pines Apartments once a week, but I hadn’t done that for months.
September 2011Behold
For a Catholic kid, there was nothing good about Good Friday. From dawn to dusk, we had to fast on toast and tea, and then, when we were good and starving, we had to choke down a bowl of my mom’s fish stew. We couldn’t cut loose or even watch TV. We were supposed to mope around looking glum. We spent the entire afternoon in church.
June 2004My Crap Life
He looks up and says me and my brother are getting a haircut on the front porch after dessert. Three days before summer, and he’s going to cut our hair.
August 1994Has something we published moved you? Fired you up? Did we miss the mark? We’d love to hear about it.
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