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Fiction
Meeting The Muse
“You got what a muse is confused with a variety of legends and a lot of your own imagination. A muse is a function, a force, not defined as to physical form. You’re too confident in your own self, where you should give more weight to the forces that feed you.”
April 1985Selected Stories
There was a turtle named Arnold who went to college. He studied carrying heavy loads and going without water. He graduated with honors as a camel.
March 1985Religion At The Home
Mrs. Paradiso had never read any part of the Bible. She did not concentrate on dogma but devotion. Her religion was not a retreat for her mind but a release for her emotions.
March 1985Buffalo Thunder
Curt said, “Indians. Buffalo. Jack, I think you’d better stay in town a while, take a vacation. Loneliness can cause hallucinations, you know.”
February 1985The Party At The End
I explained: “There was a bright flash of light, the most beautiful thing you ever saw. Then came a wave of heat. It was so painful it was almost luxuriant. Then I began to feel myself melt. And then . . . then I was preparing for this party.”
February 1985Transfer Day
Tuesday, at Gethsemane, was transfer day and when the bus arrived, the yard was invariably packed with men curious to see who was coming and going or to see one of their old partners passing through. The men scheduled to leave were already lined up at the gate with the usual effects: a roll of gray bedclothes, cigar boxes, a few books, a carton of cigarettes.
January 1985Skin-Bearing Animal
Many days Ann took the coat out of the front closet, placed it over her arm and stroked the white fur. She imagined herself standing at the North Pole surrounded by clean white snow as far as the eye could see in all directions, snow sifting from the colorful flickering sky and falling softly around her in the antiseptic cold, falling and collecting smooth and without footprint to the horizon. In the frozen wastes of her imagination, under the aurora borealis of her wounded central nervous system, she could achieve numbness.
December 1984Stories
The interpretation of the holy teachings has long been the sole activity of the monks of the Gaesheen Valley. They read ceaselessly the sacred scrolls and ponder to themselves the precise meanings to be gained from them.
October 1984The Tall One
He rolls the flower cart down the sidewalk, and I watch him through the window. Six days a week he goes by with his cart of flowers. He comes by just before visiting hours and stays until all the visitors have gone into the hospital.
October 1984The Man In The Control Booth
Wycke, I knew, had thought of his eyes as prisms, capable of seeing many points of view at once. They sat in deep dark sockets, alert, cautious, and ever vulnerable, like two small animals uneasy in their burrows.
September 1984
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