“Anna Banana,” Nonni called from the kitchen, “don’t forget to wipe your feet.” Anna’s red rubber boots were covered in muddy slush from the long walk home from school. It was always a battle to pry them off without leaving a shoe inside, but Nonni would have a fit if she tracked filth on her clean floors.
Danny slid onto his usual stool at the end of the bar, the one with duct tape holding the vinyl together like a field dressing. Joe was already pouring before Danny’s ass hit the seat. “Whiskey neat,” Joe said, setting it down. “Like you’d order anything else.”
I keep dreaming about the other girl. She is looking down into the water, and I’m looking up at her through the silvered surface. She is wearing a white slip that reflects the moon. She reaches for me and I reach for her.
by Sandy Meredith On the climbing wall, somewhere after halfway up, there’ll be a hold beyond which lies the peak. Ascent seems impossible; my only hope is that I have the strength to climb back down without falling. But if I stick to the hold and wait for the fear of falling to subside and that drug of cool calm to settle through my body, taking the peak might come more easily than I expect. And if I do it brings such a surge of warmth, it makes me smile, it gives me hope that I might make it up…
Caroline Walker’s living room was largely how you’d expect one belonging to a librarian to look. All of the walls were hidden behind bookcases; each bookcase was full, of both books standing upright and other volumes which lay sleeping across their tops. A space crammed with words, well-loved and well-used.
The little face looked up at him, or rather was turned towards him while the gaze was fixed stage right. The eyes were enormous, but they had to be, he supposed.
Contoured into the paint blistered window frame, Paula sits in the unused boatshed. She inhales the scent of damp salt through the rattling window, as a high tide slides along the banked-up shingle.
When I entered the café there was only one open table for two in the middle. For a few moments I sat alone. He tapped me on the shoulder just as my coffee arrived. “Do you mind?” he said in a light Spanish accent
Mia windmilled her arms in an effort to stay upright, having slipped kicking out at a clump of annoying nettles. At nineteen she already knew her personality type. Flighty. Unreliable. Someone who easily lost things.
She’d taken the wind out of his sails. He gripped the edge of the dining-room table. At least she couldn’t see his face. She stood behind his chair, leaning over his shoulder as she refilled his teacup. They were alone; the other residents had departed. He blinked as he realised she was still speaking.
A massive spreading oak at the edge of the gas station's asphalt shaded my car. Across the steaming blacktop, not thirty feet away, a low-built one-story cross between a home and a gas station crouched just beyond the edge of the oak's cooling canopy.
Wilhelmina Guterson scraped the frost off the kitchen window to check for any signs of life outside. The distant nub of sun clearing the horizon offered watery light but no warmth.
The Adventure Inn boasts lots of activities for its residents, even the ones who shuffle with walkers or scoot around in their wheelchairs. In fact, the brochure given to families looking to place their infirm parents lists Shuffle and Scoot along with Knit and Purl as the most popular of its daily activities for a certain set in the A wing, “A” standing for Active.
Mum was walking on the marsh again. Mrs Herbert at The Salting’s spotted her in a cardigan and slippers during one of the first frosts, staring over the kissing gate towards the sluice. The farmer drove her back.
The first time I saw Abbie, she was doing stand-up at a monthly open mic night for folk singers and poets at the Blue Angel. Her hair was blue then, and she wore an electric blue, satin cocktail dress with burgundy Doc Martens.
Fog hangs in the damp morning air when I pull the Mini Cooper into the physician’s parking section of the hospital garage. Grey and thick, it penetrates through the first-row spaces, wafting around the car, just like it did when I left the house a half hour ago.
You agree to go only because your mother wants you to. You don’t understand why she wants you to be there. You’ve never sussed out why she still is. Fear, mostly. Being with him was always a tiny bit less scary than facing the world on her own. It used to make you angry. Now that you’re grown, you understand, a little. But only a little. What did she give up? No one will ever know.
After the War my uncle Rimley disappeared into my closet and we never saw him again. Oddly, whenever I told someone this story, the first question I was asked was: what kind of name is Rimley? His mother probably thought it was pretty for a child born pretty. He was no longer pretty when he returned from the war, more wound than anything.
I've lit the candles and incense, rung the bells at the small shrine in my studio, bowed my head, all as if I'm about to start work. The sticks and the needles stand ready, lined up in their boxes; the ink in its jars, rows of blue and black, yellow, green, aqua, red.
“Marry me.” Perhaps it is the limnetic sound of lush rain that motivates Amanda Crowder to importune her lover, Orville Miller. The sound is an evocation; they stand in the middle of a large, rectangular-shaped field of corn, the rain effect composed by a southwest breeze rustling the slender, brown, heavily leafed stalks, this middle week of October.
He sits cross-legged on a small patch of flattened, hardened ground under the branches of a four-hundred-year-old beech tree. His wife stands before him, her linen bag swinging from her shoulder, ready to leave before he does. He too faces the splintered trunk of the tree and touches each of the small seven markings – scratches its surface with his fingernails, blisters of blood leaving their trace.
It’s dark and raining when you get to your car. The traffic lights next to the office fracture across your windscreen in shining, blood-red droplets, and you’re reluctant to turn on the wipers to clear them away. As you near home, you remember you need milk and pull into the petrol station.
Her eyes move from table to table, person to person. He’d somehow forgotten this in the last six months. He’d forgotten her restless eyes tracking whoever walked by, leaving the impression that he was not quite interesting enough to hold her attention. It’s a facet of her behavior that his mind has conveniently polished away.
Yesterday I woke up in Winston-Salem and The Outer Banks seemed far away; desolate and challenging. What beckoned me was unknown, but I called in sick and left. It wasn't until I passed through Columbia, skirting Albemarle Sound, that a sense of what I was doing struck me. No one knew where I was.
I'm driving home after checking out the art museum as a possible wedding venue when I see Papa's Honda outside his office building. It's past seven on Friday evening and the tall street lamp casts a pool of light on his personalized license plate which reads GRANYON―acquired after his third hike down the Grand Canyon. He's obsessed with the wonder. “Most visited tourist site in the US,” he says.
She’s standing with her back to me when I come out of the Folk Café in St James. On her T-shirt, between her shoulder blades in faded lime-green capitals, I read: Unlock the power of clothing.
I was five years old that spring. The clacks and scratches of twigs landing on and then sliding down the roof tiles woke me, as they did every day, and I listened as the pre-dawn winds flew their last sorties. Light gradually appeared in the cracks in the shutters.
I had been to this restaurant once before on a previous date that hadn’t really worked out, but I had enjoyed the food and it was affordable.
Transubstantiation. Quite a mouthful, isn’t it? More than enough for Lancelot Pritchard to choke on, though the coroner won’t be giving the official cause of death until this afternoon.
by Philippa Green Ali pulled her hand through the tangle of her hair and scowled at the bathroom mirror. Sand specks trailed the bathroom floor. The mingled scent of pine and sunscreen hung fresh on the sarong laid out to dry on the balcony. Sea salt clung to her skin, crusting her hair after a day spent half in half out of the water. “More sunscreen tomorrow,” said the mirror. “Factor 50 please.” “Of course.” Ali smiled. A tight weariness creasing her forehead. It had mostly been a day of sandcastles, moats collapsing as the tide pulled in. Squealing, laughing,…