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Fiction
Your Life’s Stakes
Full of Energy breaks well and jumps out into the lead, with Sense of Invincibility and Junk Food close behind. Galloping into fourth is Heart Murmur, who is now reined in and drops back into fifth beside Astigmatism on the rail, the rest of the pack trailing by a good nine lengths.
August 2007
Slides
In 1955, when I was nine years old and my sister was ten, my father bought his first 35 mm camera with money he didn’t have and dragged us and my mother on a cross-country trip for the opening of Disneyland. He went crazy taking pictures of us standing at the edge of cliffs, holding snakes, showing scrapes and bruises, and pretending to be happy.
August 2007
Hungarian Relief
I was thirteen in 1956. There was a lot going on in the world that year. Elvis Presley released his first album, the U.S. exploded the first airborne hydrogen bomb over Bikini Atoll, and the Soviets invaded Hungary to put down an anticommunist revolution. There was also something going on in my house. I was only half aware of it, but it formed a kind of constant undercurrent, like a noise that your brain has not yet registered hearing.
July 2007
In The Near Dark
At first there’s darkness, and then darkness becoming less dark, then vaguely dark, then just shadows and the glow of sunlight pushing on closed blinds. There’s Melanie’s tangled black hair falling on the pillow inches from my face, a sniffle and the ruffle of sheets as her leg moves. There’s a siren howling closer and closer and then fading. The phone rings, then rings again.
June 2007
The Apology
When I was a boy, I lived in the country about fifty miles outside of San Antonio, Texas. Our house was a trailer my father had set up on large cedar posts, three feet in the air. He covered the space below with aluminum siding and added a front porch to give the trailer a more houselike appearance. We had an above-ground pool, too.
May 2007
Cuba Libre
Halfway through the first day, we passed an army caravan. Father said they were going to the Sierra Maestra mountains to kill Fidel Castro, “the enemy of Fulgencio Batista and General Motors.” I knew nothing then about Batista’s dictatorship and Castro’s attempts to overthrow it.
May 2007
Fast Talk
At fourteen, shoplifting is fun. Like a sport, it takes a lot of skill. I have to be quick and gutsy and able to fool people. I put on my good-girl face and wear my cargo pants because they have deep pockets.
April 2007
Free As Mr. B.
Dell is sitting at the nurses’ desk trying to read Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, an assignment for her playwriting class. She can get away with this because the head honchos have all gone home, and evening has settled its lazy, sticky lassitude over the psychiatric unit.
March 2007
The Stove
Like most older neighborhoods, ours had a haunted house. Mrs. Licht and her grown daughter lived in it. (Mr. Licht had died many years earlier.) The lawn was unkempt and overgrown with weeds, the windows had wrought-iron grillwork over them, and the green paint on the clapboards had cracked into a scaly pattern like the skin of a lizard.
February 2007
What Are You Waiting For?
You wake to the sound of Dixon’s voice: “I forgot to meet the bus. She’s not there; she’s not here. Do you know where she is?”
January 2007
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