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Fiction
Hag
Mariette tells me we still have beautiful legs, both of us, even if our faces have gone to seed. I am fifty. She is fifty-three and not from this country. A few minutes ago, I was driving into town to a friend’s to decorate Easter eggs when I saw Mariette walking along the road.
November 1996Spin Cycle
I’ve always thought there’s something lusty about laundromats. Perhaps that’s why I’m so taken by the young woman I notice as I fumble for change to start my two loads. She’s very European — or at least that’s what I imagine.
November 1996What We Came For
They had to wait a long time for the harvest to begin. Gerard talked to Kate of nothing else for weeks. He imagined the two of them working their way across Canada, then down the West Coast of the U.S., picking fruit and living like gypsies.
October 1996Mickey Mantle, Mother, And The Secret Service
It’s August 1995, and Billy says the Mick is as good as dead. My brother counts one, two, three on his fingers: “First they give him a new liver. Then the cancer they missed eats up his lung. Then he dies.”
October 1996Notes For Future Tenants
My boyfriend, Tony, tells me he remembers seeing Muddy Waters sitting in a chair on Maxwell Street in Chicago playing the blues. He says it was a Sunday morning and Muddy was playing alone. Now the Maxwell Street market shines with the silver circles of cleaned hubcaps, hanging for sale.
September 1996Tree-Jumper
He told me about his own first “transgression”: fondling a seven-year-old girl; how one thing led to another (he was mostly vague about his crimes) until he finally got caught. How his greatest fear was that he would someday molest his own children, though he didn’t have any yet. The other inmates at Coxsackie had pinned a label on him: “tree-jumper,” a guy who stalks children and hides in bushes or behind trees.
September 1996The Toy Factory
The astronaut and his guides were making their way toward Assembly when Sally Jerzik lost her finger in the box press. People said her screams were louder than the conveyors, louder than the hoppers even.
September 1996Silas
Silas works at a social-service agency. He sits inside a cubicle, behind a metal desk with a simulated-wood surface. One by one, people — mostly old women, but some old men, too — come and sit on a metal folding chair across the desk from Silas, where they weep and whine and struggle to maintain their dignity and finally grow vexed and demand their Social Security checks.
September 1996The Game Of High School
Bob Penny, voted Most Self-Absorbed Hunk by a committee of me, said, I am in my big-boob period, as he pretended to swoon over Lisa Belia. I took his remark to be of the making-me-jealous variety. I didn’t even have to pretend to ignore it, because I was in love with you.
August 1996A Coward And A Thief
On the counter top there’s a pad of paper with some familiar but illegible scrawl. The handwriting is angry. Next to the pad is a five-dollar bill under a refrigerator magnet. Too obvious. More clunking sounds from the basement. I wonder if he’s down there.
August 1996
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