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Fiction
Sawdust
Sugar suspected I was a fruitcake because of my friendship with Mr. Quick, which began during my freshman year. Sugar had learned about it from my mother. (My father was dead.)
April 2005
Not A Scratch
The first time he takes a shower after coming home, he looks himself over: Ten fingers. Ten toes. No scars beyond the ones he collected in childhood.
April 2005The Wake
The phone rings during dinner. The break in the silence is a relief, but I don’t move. In fact, I pretend I don’t even hear it. I’m fifteen and angry at my father for making me stay home again on a Friday night. He pretends not to hear the phone either.
March 2005
The High Heart
Keith had had a plenty rough day, most of it spent with his girlfriend, Bonnie, in an abortion clinic just outside of Pittsburgh. You could see how frayed he was: skinny as hell and that big head of electrocuted hair, smoking one cigarette after another, the blue veins in his forehead like hot wires about to rupture.
February 2005
Rose’s
My stomach lurched because I realized that Carl looked like his father, and therefore would not become handsome. He would never escape the prison of his ugliness. I hated Mr. Leach for destroying the beauty of Carl’s face for me.
January 2005
My Sister, The Writer
My sister is a writer. She writes terrible things about me. She thinks she is telling the family secrets, but we all think she’s hysterical.
January 2005
Dear Me
If you are reading this letter, then I have some bad news for you. You’ve always been a straight shooter, so here it is: You have Alzheimer’s.
December 2004
Giant
Calling, “Soldiers! Americans!” Luu Mong hurried over the mounds of earth that connected the rice fields of the peasants. His mother’s voice trailed him (“Slow down, slow down”), a reminder that the enemy often left in a bloody heap any man, woman, or child who moved swiftly across the landscape. Luu Mong slowed to an amble, circulated among the peasants, and halted at the edge of the field where Thien and her grandma were weeding. “Soldiers,” he said. “Didn’t you hear me?”
November 2004
Just The Same
Nothing has changed in an obvious way. The sunlight slanting into his bedroom this morning is just as bright as it was the day before. Outside on the street, the mounds of dirty snow are perhaps a bit smaller. Water puddles on the sidewalks. For breakfast he fries eggs. He fetches the newspaper lying outside his apartment door. It’s probably just his imagination that the paper is heavier than usual, as if wet. The pages are dry. He tells himself that when he turns them, they will not glisten with blood.
November 2004
What The Dead Know
It began in the hospitals with what seemed to be an epidemic of miracles. The most recently dead came back first. People whose heartbeats had just flat-lined a second earlier suddenly sat upright on their gurneys and beds and looked into the confused faces of those around them.
October 2004
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