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Fiction
My Study On Stay-Puts
You can do your studies on us migratory types all you want. My sister Rose came home from school last year saying that’s what you stay-puts call us. I told her you’re probably the same guys yelling White trash bastards go home when we drive through Salem. She says, no, you wouldn’t yell at us.
December 1992Wings Of Wax
It was a long bus ride from Mexico City to San Miguel, coming as it did on the heels of the overnight flight. You were glad when it ended and at the same time you would have preferred to keep on going.
November 1992The Wreck
Shirley Moody got sick in our house that night from sunburn, and that night — two nights after my ninth birthday — my daddy had a little too much whiskey and drove the Austin-Healey through the fence down on the canal.
November 1992Meet Mr. Fist
Random violence, as I practice it, is a delicate task. You want to injure the punchee just enough to make him or her think, without causing any major damage.
October 1992Promises
Driving home from work, Bones rehearsed what he’d say when he broke up with Linda. “I got to get out,” he might say. Or, “I’m no good for you.”
October 1992Talk
My father brought Jake’s body home from Colorado in a record-breaking blizzard.
September 1992Siren’s Song
Solitude seems possible; the sea and sky are wedged into the cove by two walls of volcanic rock. The horizon is broken only by an occasional sail.
September 1992Last Year’s Poverty Was Not Enough
The day hadn’t begun well, but it was just another day in a long line of mean, anxious hours. Time mashed in on her like a couple of hands folded hard in prayer.
September 1992Straight From The Mouth
I didn’t think I’d hear again from my grandmother’s second husband, Uncle Benny, and then he called one Wednesday afternoon, three years after my grandmother had left him. I was stacking money on my bed at the time — ones on the pillow, fives at the foot, and tens in the middle where I could see them easiest.
August 1992Fifty Guilders
I sat by myself on the train from Copenhagen. In the middle of the night, the door to my compartment opened. A young woman wearing a ponytail, a T-shirt, and a dark blue suit eyed me stretched out on the seat, my gray hair curled over my collar. Then she decided to come in. She heaved her baggage into the overhead rack, shut the door, and stretched out on the opposite seat.
August 1992
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