The fabric seats in the gold Oldsmobile were damp with sweat and smelled like hamburger grease. The girl was sitting in the backseat behind her mother, leaning her forehead on the window in the hopes that it would cool her down. Her brother hummed alongside her, behind their driving stepfather
Lucy found the booth at a farmers’ market just outside the city on a rainy Wednesday afternoon when she was supposed to be looking for a job, having just yesterday quit the one she had found last month.
She woke into a memory. They were in a theatre, in the dark, and the stage had become a painting. The actors were completely still as the curtain was raised. The greenery was lush and real.
A breeze finds the door to the study room ajar and flows in. On a corner table, in a vase, a bouquet of tulips laments its indoor predicament. One tulip remembers the garden, and sheds a petal like a small yellow boat onto the Persian rug.
She died in the night while I was sleeping and this morning, two polite men in dark suits come from the funeral home, wrap her body in a white sheet, take her down the hall on a rolling gurney,
Every Thursday the same woman arrived with a paper bag of crumbs. She scattered them gently, as though remembering names instead of feeding pigeons.
The five of them wore hats and coats. Their instruments grew from their hands. They played by ear. Their names were lost. They were a band from Latvia. That's all I know
I hand you the book like evidence; this time, Heaney. “That’s good,” you say (your face, your voice—so sexy, I think). Our resonance.
by Susan Miller Her Faith Broke Her faith broke on a Fridayin March, one of those daysthat wobbled on winter’s lastlegs with its teasing sun butbiting air. As she tended thegarden her head felt heavy,stuffed with those long agoCatholic school sayings fromSister Margaret Somethingwith steel eyes that poppedout from a veil that swallowedher face, her endless rosarybeads and 1,000 reasonsGod never gave you morethan you could handle.Why, she wondered, wasit when daffodil stalkspoke through frozen mud,when you cross a finishline, hear him say foreveror ring the bell, why whenanything good happens it isall in God’s plan, yes verymuch in good…
The bed here was firm, like R’s body, when he was mine. The comforter, pristine white. I don't usually sit on hotel room blankets. I imagine strangers’ organisms squirming in the fibers.
This is my first time writing my thoughts down in a locked book full of blank white pages. As if that would stop someone from looking at my secrets. If there is a desire, a way can be found.
Nabat wears a black t-shirt stamped with a Brylcreemed, sideburned Elvis. He leans on the railing of the Saphan Krung Thon footway, watching the sun dip over Thonburi.
Paint me at first as a child might, with fingers over a sweep of gloss. Do not be afraid to choose the incongruous: fuchsia, perhaps,or saffron. Apricot or indigo.
We sit at a small table by the front door. Steam swirls from Tim’s black coffee whenever the door opens to let in a burst of cold air. He is talking. I look everywhere except at him.
The first thing we did was buy a wire trap at Walmart. It came pre-assembled and had an easy to carry handle. We put the trap in the darkest corner of the backyard and the rush of anticipation made sleep an impossibility.
I was considering the shapewear my agent had sent me when Richard Chamberlain knocked on my patio door. He rapped three times on the glass, twice hard and the third time after a short pause, like a code to let me know he was an okay guy.
Before, there were golden years when mountains of barley piled high behind the sleeper-wall dam. Then the lean years when they relied on the bank manager’s goodwill to keep the farm going.
The water pouring from my kitchen faucet into the stainless-steel sink sounds like a drumroll. The sound gives me butterflies, just the tiniest hint. It takes some time for the water to heat up, and the drumroll continues.
July 10, 1954 was the day I almost died. I was nine years old, five miles from home, and carrying more money than I had ever earned. It was also the day Calogero Vizzini, "Don Calò," the Italian mob boss, died.