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Fiction
Holy Ghost
At first I thought it was learning or wisdom. Then it came to me: my husband was a ghost; he had nothing but what he could steal from people. He could take the things they cared about most. It was his great gift.
March 1996Solitaire
He would look into the pits the SS left behind and see the grabbing hands and slippered feet, the bloodstained clothes and pale limbs, the wide and frightened eyes covered with a film of dirt.
March 1996Visions
It just bursts from me like a thunderclap, only there’s never any clap when my Vision grabs hold. It’s like I fall asleep, but my eyes stay open and the hand holding the pen just moves over the paper all by itself.
February 1996New Courses
The Tao of Toast: In this workshop, participants will learn to brown toast, butter it, and eat it. A continuation, “What to Do with the Crumbs,” will be offered later this summer.
February 1996The Empty House Of My Brokenhearted Father
It was 4 A.M. and I was walking home from the bar with another man’s wife. I’d been in love with her since she was a little girl, but my good friend had snapped her up very young. I never had a chance.
February 1996B I R D
On a hot summer day when my brother was eight months old, my father carried him to the top step of the back porch, lifted him over his head, and tossed him into the weeds.
February 1996The Eye Man
“Darn,” said the eye man. “Darn.” He ran a hand through his long black hair and shook his head. “OK,” he finally said. “OK, OK, OK. Here it is, right? Here it is: I can’t make eyes that will help her son see. No, I can’t do that. But I will make him eyes that will help everyone else see.”
February 1996Cities With Spanish Names
It had all been very proper. There had been letters between Luz’s home in Guadalajara, and Los Angeles, where Diego’s family had lived for some years. Diego’s parents wanted him to marry a decent mexicana, not a wild American girl with no morals, and Luz was the daughter of old family friends. Diego traveled to Guadalajara to marry her, and she came to live with him in Los Angeles.
January 1996The World Bank
Beth kneels on the edge of the bed, re-counting her American money and finding again only five hundred-dollar bills where there had been seven. She leans over, nearly toppling off the sloping mattress, to ferret underneath the mahogany night stand, but comes up only with handfuls of dense brown dust.
January 1996Decline Of The Lawrence Welk Empire
I get a postcard from a place called Paradise, and on the back is a note from an old friend that says, “Free lunch under the coconut trees.” It is the season of disco and dope smoking, of long, ramshackle cars built by cocaine addicts in Michigan, of oil embargoes and promiscuity and awful haircuts, and I look around at the girls and boys in their platform shoes and bell bottoms and everybody divorced or pregnant or stoned or listening to disco and scratching their VD sores, and I know the world is coming to an end, so I call United Airlines and order a one-way ticket to Paradise.
January 1996
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