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Fiction
Sweethearts Of The Rodeo
We tore across the back field, our heels digging into their sides. We pulled them up short and did somersaults off their backs, or handstands in the saddle. We turned on a dime. We jumped the coop, the wall, the ditch. We were fearless. It was the summer we smoked our first cigarettes, the summer you broke your arm. It was the last summer, the last one, before boys.
June 2006
Mercy
The children’s puppy was run over at the end of May. Not on the main road, which Pam might have expected, but on the dirt track that formed the western boundary of the farm.
May 2006
Communion
Ever since the divorce, my mother had been living life at a frantic pace. There were mornings when she hardly had time to butter her bread, let alone toast it.
April 2006
Hello, Gorgeous!
His biggest thrill was meeting someone new. Three or four times a day, at least, he would see a girl and just be unable to stop looking at her. Hello, gorgeous! he would think.
April 2006
This Is Not That Story
The boy fell from the dormitory balcony sometime between two o’clock and four o’clock in the morning. It had already been snowing for several hours, and it continued to snow after he lay on the ground, so that by the time the dirty white truck rumbled up to the residential quad at 6:15 and three men — the university groundskeepers — climbed wearily from the back, armed with shovels, the snow was nearly six inches deep.
March 2006
Essay #3: Leda And The Swan
Although the swan is not a delicate creature like a butterfly, and is not cuddly and cute like a kitten, it is a living thing that can feel pain and hunger just like any other living creature. In “Leda and the Swan,” by William Butler Yeats, a perverted sort of swan ends up performing sexual intercourse with a loose girl named Leda.
March 2006
Still Life With Candles And Spanish Guitar
The story goes roughly like this: Girl meets boy in chat room, agrees to meet downtown for coffee. And does, and after three minutes of coffee can see it’s not good.
February 2006Begin With An Outline
Besides the bananas, my dad raises chickens and grows red ginger and marijuana. I’m not sure how large his drug operation is or how much money he makes. I know that he smokes a lot of pot, but not so much for recreational purposes. It’s more about testing his wares. He rolls joints. He doesn’t own a bong, hookah, pipe, chillum, vaporizer, scale, dugout system, grinder, or steamroller. He’s old school.
January 2006
Brasalina
I was seven years old and had just started summer vacation when I learned that my brand-new grandmother from New York City was coming to stay with us for a week or two, “to meet her new family.” Brasalina, a half-black, half-Indian Brazilian woman of twenty-one, had just married my grandfather, my father’s father, who was eighty-three and too ill to come with her on this visit.
January 2006
The Friend Beside The Pool
Prince Siddhartha Gautama had seen the cat many times, though it was cunningly concealed under the overhanging leaves at the edge of the palace-garden pool. The cat was white, and so not quite as well hidden as it probably thought it was, despite the long shadows of morning.
December 2005
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