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Fiction
Oh, Anthony
She squints into the afternoon sun to avoid the cop’s eyes as he leans against the open screen door. “All right, Maria,” he says, squaring his shoulders and digging into his pockets like all the cops she’s seen on TV.
December 1993Angel Of Lamentations
Suddenly, angels began arriving. They went about their business with casual vigor, sometimes passing within inches of the two old people, who did not know they were there. Each angel had a different job.
December 1993Your Own People
I look at her, the words to hit and cut and run burning in my throat. She knows I could use them, too. It’s from her I got this mouth that can soothe and slice in alternate breaths.
December 1993Retribution
Believe this. In the bed is a man. Frail, white, diaphanous skin shows through the purple of blood vessels that map his arm lying bare on the sheet. Jaws work soundlessly. He is thinking. The past slowly draws forward from far away and the present fades, becomes wispy and fades away, and this means he is dying.
November 1993Hatching Denise
At thirty-one, I steadily decay. Breasts succumb to gravity and sag. My eyes weaken. My senses falter. Well-meaning friends have offered referrals for plastic surgeons, opticians, and psychoanalysts, hinting at the necessity to fight the breakdown of body, the breakup of mind.
November 1993Hearts
You knew a boy who died of suicide. It was a mountain and he was playing chicken with friends, but he wanted to fall, he wanted to be the dead one. His parents said. You weren’t there.
November 1993Might Have Been
“Mom, did you ever have an abortion?” Annabel helped herself to more lasagna, meticulously skirting the carrots that Kit had sneaked into the filling. “If you don’t mind my asking.”
October 1993If We’re Lucky
“Prophet?”No one had called me that in a while. Before I turned around, before I looked for his face in the mirror behind the bar, I knew, I felt who it was.
October 1993The Great Army
When I was a child I used to beg the Old Buddhist to tell this story over and over again, especially the descriptions of the soldiers.
September 1993Jane’s Letter
Jane lingers in bed beneath the veil of the mosquito net and listens to schoolchildren slosh their clothing in buckets of water near her window.
September 1993
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