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Fiction
Letters Unsent
Dear Frank,
You always liked it short and sweet. Here it is: Don’t sleep and sigh and move around on your cushion in the zendo. It disturbs others, and is conspicuous and self-centered.
My Life In Marketing Research
When I returned from Denver to Manhattan last fall I needed a job. My first idea was to be one of those guys who sit on boxes outside discount stores on Dyckman Street watching that no one steals plastic coat hangers — but all those positions were filled. My next plan was to be Santa Claus.
March 1987Liberating Horses
She had her favorite already. He was the one who had implored her most beseechingly to get him out where he could run and play, and he was the one who was happiest to be out, munching the tender green grass, running this way and that, jumping and kicking.
February 1987Two Stories
I spend a lot of time thinking up improvements on God. When Frank thinks I’m busy typing letters, I’m actually preparing my list. Frank is my boss, the pastor of a large church. He is rotund, and endlessly talkative.
January 1987Heritage Clay
Her fingers caressed her statue. She pressed her thumbs into the woman’s forehead. Her beloved clay was soft and cool and oily. Her mother had willed her the clay. Heritage clay. Ninety years old. “It will mold your life,” her mother had said. Now Dorothy’s life threatened the clay. Her hand was too heavy.
January 1987Backlighting
Alice’s husband was a man constantly in motion, and now that he has returned as a blue jay he is not much different. If anything, he is more nervously energetic than ever.
December 1986You’re Weird, Irene
The woman sits there a while and then we can see her face changing. It looks like she’s got all the troubles in the whole world. Her face crinkles up and she starts to cry. She wipes away her tears but they keep coming down and flowing into her toothless mouth.
December 1986The Pure In Heart
The voice is unmistakable. At the first intonation, the first rolling syllable, Swain wakes, feeling the murmuring life of each of a million cells. Each of them all at once. He feels the line where his two lips touch, the fingers of his left hand pressed against his leg, the spears of wet grass against the flat soles of his feet, the gleaming half-circles of tears that stand in his eyes. His own bone marrow hums inside him like colonies of bees. He feels the breath pouring in and out of him, through the damp, red passages of his skull. Then in the slow way that fireworks die, the knowledge fades. He is left again with his surfaces and the usual vague darkness within. He turns back around to see if Julie has heard.
November 1986Fire Moving In The Sky
It was the first time events made a difference, the first time I recognized an involvement in what happened beyond the few back yards and playmates that were my universe, the first time anyone said, “You will remember this day forever,” and I believed it.
October 1986Gold And Black
Then he turns to me, and direct as an arrow says, “You gonna be there?” (This, I thought, is what they refer to in books as “the moment of truth.”) My heart was creeping up my esophagus like an inchworm; but my tongue would not unwind.
October 1986
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