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Fiction
Fiction
Storm
It was too hot to do anything except wait for the heat to end, wait for rain. Wait on the red brick porch, down at the end of our street where the road made a wide, looping turn, disappearing into a tangled mess of kudzu vines.
September 1993Fiction
Uncle Ruff
I was not hallucinating. Here was time incarnate, bareheaded, wrapped in heavy bib overalls and flannel, and moving in a lithe, short-stepping dance about the concrete ramp.
August 1993Fiction
Sister Of Kane
Allie stepped onto the slanted porch, and the wind swept into her shirt. The chill broke her out in goose bumps, but it felt better than the heat inside the frame house. Kane sat on the steps at her feet.
July 1993Fiction
Progress
The first time we had Joe over, one spring evening some years ago, he lay on his gurney with his face positioned toward us.
July 1993Fiction
The Room Where Sex Began
Bobby and I were tired. His family was visiting for a week, and we’d been up late every night since they arrived. I realize now Bobby’s parents hated him. I don’t know why.
July 1993Fiction
This Summer
My husband has told me that this summer he will retire. Right now he is in the library holding X-rays up to the light and dictating. I do not know how his secretary understands the things he mumbles.
July 1993Fiction
Fidelity
She stood up. “Excuse me for interrupting,” she said to the minister, “but he can’t do that. He’s married to me already. We never really got divorced. I never gave him a divorce. Those are our children sitting there in front of you.” She addressed the bride. “It’s better for you to know now than to find out later.”
June 1993Fiction
Survivors
“It was winter when the commandant ordered us girls loaded into the truck,” my mother says. “We were naked, all young girls, maybe twelve, thirteen years old. You —” she points at me, “you would die with embarrassment at being naked in front of so many people.”
June 1993Fiction
Homeland
They called their refugee years The Time When We Were Not, and they were forgiven, because they had carried the truth of themselves in a sheltered place inside the flesh, exactly the way a fruit that has gone soft still carries inside itself the clean, hard stone of its future.
June 1993Fiction
Losing A Preposition
In April, Boyd’s sister phoned from Los Angeles, where several years ago she had landed a leading part in a movie that flopped, was resurrected for a brief life on cable, and then disappeared. She kept auditioning for more movie parts but never got one.
May 1993
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