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Fiction
Burying Angel O’Malley
I had thought that watching them carry Angel out the door for the last time would be the hardest part to bear, but then they picked up the lid and put it over her again, and her father reached into his pocket and pulled out a nail and began to hammer it in. Usually hammering is a good sound.
December 2006
Bomb Shelter
The man who’d owned the house before us had put in a fallout shelter because he’d thought the Russians were going to drop a nuclear bomb on us. It was in the field behind the house, and my mother had said I was too young to go down there, which didn’t bother me much, because it looked scary and the ladder was steep and you could barely see the bottom of it.
November 2006
A Heart In Port
“Tripoli, Havana, Cyprus, Panama, San Juan.” My mother ticks off the names of the places she has lived, chanting them like a prayer. She married my father, a navy man, and followed him from post to post. When I was very young, young enough to sit with her in the middle of the day drinking milk from a plastic cup while she had her afternoon coffee, she would tell me about those places.
October 2006
Moonlight
In winter they would board the train to Vienna: Little Max, his parents, and his grandmother. They always traveled at night, and they always left on the same day, just past the middle of December. Little Max knew that it was the same day, year after year, and it confused him when he looked up one year and saw the moon was almost full.
September 2006
Lavender
As a child I thought of my mother and father in terms of centuries. This man and this woman had lived forever, it seemed, born wholly formed and unchanging, waiting patiently for my sisters and me to come along. Had someone told me my parents were, in truth, scarcely more than children themselves, I would have considered it a lie to rival the tooth fairy.
August 2006
Breathe
For four consecutive Saturday mornings when we were in ninth grade, Brian Henderson and I went to a second-floor office above the pharmacy downtown to breathe. We woke at eight o’clock. We could not brush our teeth or eat.
August 2006
Under The Apple Tree
When Joe left me sitting under the apple tree and started to walk across the meadow toward my trailer, he looked back and waved, and then walked on, and then he did a complete circle with his arms out, like he was embracing the world. That made me laugh, because he was so happy and willing to show it.
August 2006
The Frog Prince
For the first hundred years at the bottom of the well, the frog prince rehearsed his memoir. It went like this: He was born into a sweet life of silks and pastries. Then one day this humpbacked hag of a peasant came to plead her case before the king. What did she want? He couldn’t remember. Something trivial.
August 2006
John Lennon Is Dead And It Really Bothers Me
My Aunt Maggie had actually gone to see the Beatles (my Uncle Peter had taken her when the band had come to Houston), and we would beg Maggie to tell us about the concert. When she consented, it was as though we were in catechism on Sunday, learning about the saints.
July 2006
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