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...
A copperhead lay coiled. Part of me not sight knew it was there. The atavistic like flint rock sparked. Amazon tribes see Venus in daylight. My grandfather needed no watch to tell time. What more migh...
What made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting small things first, the smell of the soap her mother had bathed with, the color of the dress she’d worn to ch...
The name's Old Testament derivation did not surprise him. Campbell's first name was Exra, and there was an Absalom and a Solomon in the camp. But no Lukes or Matthews, which Buchanan had once noted, t...
Some of the highlanders considered the true Christmas to be on January fourteenth. Old Christmas, they called it, believing it was the day the magi visited the Christ child.
Maybe calling it being hitched ain’t the prettiest way to say you’re married, but it’s the truth to my mind and true in a good way, because you’re working together and depending on each other, and you...
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...
All the while remembering what it had felt like when the world you knew had up and vanished, and you needed to find something to bring that world back, and you weren’t sure that you could.
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...
When deep summer comes and the dog star raises with the morning sun, the land can scab up and a man watch his spring crop wrinkle brown like something on fire. It's the season snakes go blind. Their e...
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...
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.
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...
It’s a hard place this world can be. No wonder a baby cries coming into it. Tears from the very start.
In a small Southern town during the 1950s, elopement and divorce were serious moral transgressions deserving of punishment.
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...