The woman doesn't look up. It's as if she's deaf. Maybe she is. Maybe she's like the Cambodian women I've read about, the ones who witnessed so many atrocities that they have willed themselves blind....
The lift of her heart she'd felt on the outcrop she now felt again, and it wasn't just love. She'd felt love before, known its depths when her mother died.This was something rarer. Happiness, Laurel t...
She’d never known fear had a taste, but it did.
She is waiting. Each spring the hard rains come and the creek rises and quickens, and more of the bank peels off, silting the water brown ad bringing to light another layer of dark earth, Decades pass...
In a small Southern town during the 1950s, elopement and divorce were serious moral transgressions deserving of punishment.
I missed that one,' Henryson said. 'The war, I mean.''Don't worry,' Snipes said. 'Another one's always coming down the pike. That's something all your historians and philosophers agree on. A feller ov...
A mown hay field appears, its blond stubble blackened by a flock of starlings. As I pass, the field seems to lift, peek to see what's under itself, then resettles. A pickup passes from the other direc...
Short fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring everything I've learned about poetry - the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as possible - but also the a...
I love learning about different dialects and I own all sorts of regional and time-period slang dictionaries. I often browse through relevant ones while writing a story. I also read a lot of diaries an...
You cut up your feet pretty good, but nothing deep enough to need stitches. That was almost a mile walk and you sick as him, and barefoot to boot. I don’t know how you did it. You must love that child...
Water has its own archaeology, not a layering but a leveling, and thus is truer to our sense of the past, because what is memory but near and far events spread and smoothed beneath the present's surfa...
Spend a long time alone, especially if you're someone who's never been that social to begin with, and you find yourself craving solitude.
One guy has his head on a table, eyes closed, vomit drooling from his mouth. Another pulls out his false teeth and clamps them on the ear of a gal at the next table. An immense woman in a purple jumps...
Of course, who can forget that first love, or first sex, or first drink - especially if they all occur together. I also remember how, after Ligeia had left our lives, I'd worried for months that she m...
It’s a hard place this world can be. No wonder a baby cries coming into it. Tears from the very start.
I guess sometimes you’ve got the hope-fors so much it makes you imagine all sorts of things.
He carries what he feels for people deep inside. Even as a kid he was that way, Aunt Margaret said. Your momma knows that. But I had wondered then as I did now what good love was that couldn’t be expr...
After hours of wearing stifling suits while seated on rigid pews and high-backed dining chairs, to enter water and splay our limbs was freeing. The midday sun fell full on the pool, so when we waded i...
A great business investment, religion. I’ll take it over government bonds anytime.
A car horn startled her, and she knew if she lived here the rest of her life, she'd never get used to the busyness of town life, how something was always coming and going and whatever that something w...