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Fiction
Some Keep The Sabbath
I stopped going to church the night Diane Pearson announced God filled her cavities. That same night, in the spring of 1973, the police arrested my sister, Sheila.
January 1998Sunday Driving
My mother thinks her boyfriend is a father figure for me. I think he’s a derelict. His name is David. I call him the Big D — D for Derelict. He’s always trying to help me with things.
January 1998Manna
On Sunday morning at a quarter to six, Lilli calls for me. Her cry hits me in my sleep like a hurled knife. Lightning flashes through my brain; my stomach cramps up; my heart flutters. With eyes closed, I wait for her next cry.
December 1997How To Find Him
Listen to your mother’s story about playing baseball at fourteen and hearing her own mother say to a friend, I don’t know what I’ll do about Martha’s looks. Wonder if your mom’s speaking in code. Is she going to say that you’re pretty, or has she just told you why she never will?
December 1997The Physics Of Suspension
When she finished saying she was sorry, I hung up without a word and stood before the phone, blushing. The wooden earrings my mother had given me a few years before burned in my earlobes. Hadn’t I just spoken to her the night before? No, the week before. But she and my father were still there, in California, and they were all right. I trusted them to be there always, like gravity, or paychecks.
November 1997The Living End
What I remember most about Sarah Collins is her face pressed up against the back window of the El Camino as the car sped down our street. A big hand was reaching over her forehead, trying to pry her from the glass. On the middle finger was a silver ring that caught a ray of sunlight. I squinted from the glare, and the car was gone.
November 1997Hey Jude
Always before it had been of no consequence: someone else’s intensive care. It had meant nothing to her in her normal life that, all day and all night, through waxing and waning moons and in every season, a child balanced on the eggshell edge of life, and someone else simply waited.
October 1997Teeth, Death, My Friend Louise
I’m forty-one, but my nine-year-old son persists in thinking I’m only forty. He’s at that phase when children become obsessed with their parents’ mortality, and for him this takes the guise of frequent (incorrect) recitations of my age, my birth date, and how old I’ll be on my next birthday.
October 1997The Vulgar Soul
As his sessions with the psychiatrist progressed, the stigmata bled less frequently. Hogue was getting more sleep, and though he continued to lose weight, he managed to eat something every day. He felt cautiously hopeful.
September 1997Starting Kevin
The idea of a baby sucking on her breast, the way her boyfriend back in Durant had liked to do, disgusted Vanessa, but she said she would try it. Kevin didn’t seem interested — just mouthed at her soft flesh and fell asleep — although he latched on quickly to the firm bottle nipple the maternity-ward nurses offered.
September 1997
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