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Fiction
Fiction
Family Genes
Chloe looked at Big Daddy, huddled and quivering in her grandmother’s lap. Big Daddy, once a plump, nervous, annoying Chihuahua, was now a frail, nervous, annoying Chihuahua. Every so often he would snort and wheeze and gag, like an aging coal miner.
May 1993Fiction
Vilna
I’m forever telling myself how lucky I am to have you for a grandson. Your grandmother always said you were one in a million whenever you came to stay with us for a week in Florida. You ate what she gave you without any complaints, you fixed up the sofa bed every morning, and you always asked if there was something you could do for her to help. She loved introducing you to everyone at the clubhouse
April 1993Fiction
Victory
In their letter to the weekly newspaper, the Klan hadn’t said what time they planned to arrive, just that on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination they would be in Churchill passing out literature and demonstrating. When I called around town to find out what people were planning to do about it, the consensus in the white community was that we should ignore them.
April 1993Fiction
A Soccer Hooligan In America
We’re on this Greyhound bus heading down to an American football stadium in New Orleans for the England v. USA preliminaries of the World Soccer Championships. About ten of us all told, England supporters every last one.
April 1993Fiction
Easter Weekend
When I was twenty years old, I had the opportunity to witness the cremation of a human body. It was springtime in Virginia, when the air is laced with the fragrance of magnolia and cherry, and I was still young enough to think of death as merely a normal rite of passage.
April 1993Fiction
Septimius
Septimius and Barron, inseparable pair, make their way along the wide, tree-lined median strip, wading through ninety-five-degree heat.
March 1993Fiction
Present For Her
I’m in a shopping-mall restroom in California, where the roll of toilet paper is almost as big as a tire. Three more giant rolls are stacked on a sterile white shelf.
March 1993Fiction
The Word
My parents, long accustomed to life without me, have developed a routine and a delicate family ecosystem that is interrupted by my visits. Daddy, sensing the imbalance caused by my presence, gets ornery and, according to Mama, “has ugly spells.”
March 1993Fiction
Impossible
It is Christmas Eve and I am visiting my dying father. He has been in bed since the robbery. The smell in his room is dark green, the odor of fermenting vegetables and flesh.
March 1993Fiction
January
I take another drink and rouse slowly from the state I entered when I first rested the rifle across the wheel line. It is a state that I impose upon myself at such times, a suspension of thought in favor of impartial and necessary action.
March 1993
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