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The 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.

The Prayer Of The Body III

An Interview With Stephen R. Schwartz

This body only appears to be an enclosure. It is actually a passageway — like an entry to a cave or a cathedral. It is quite the opposite of the way we’ve been taught to perceive it.

That Lazy Old Alligator Mr. Time

A Device To Save My Life

From the inside cover of this particular book, an ad jumped out at me. I immediately knew that it would deliver me from my own enemies, most prominent among them Herr Schneider, my swimming instructor, who gave meaning to his life by ridiculing me in front of my classmates.

Close Calls

Getting mugged in Central Park, doing angel dust, driving into a telephone pole

Sunbeams

We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little precision in matters of the soul.

Robert Musil

Everybody’s Lie

The only thing more complete than this moment will be the loss of it, as memory repudiates everything. But why complain, when even the complaint will be forgotten?

Big Ideas

For a long time the whole idea of God is bewildering to a little girl, but in a dreamy and faraway fashion, you know him. Like the moon and the stars across the night’s long distance, you love and fear him.

Quaking

The landfill under the office where I work holds the decomposed bones of old ships and piers, derelicts not worth repairing, sunk in the harbor. Our building has piles sunk straight down to bedrock, supposed to keep us standing when the ground all around quivers and liquefies.

Song

Then my father saw me. Liam got up — to keep him from me, I think. What chance did he think he had against such hate? My father threw him down again.