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Fiction
Fiction
Around The Rugged Rock
Such primal taciturnity, thought Rex of the rock, and after all it’s heard — the roar of the victor, the bleat of the victim, and all the echoes thereof ten thousand times over. Surely, I’ve fallen in with good company. Surely, a revelation is in the offing.
October 1982Fiction
The New Age
There are only two goats. The big one’s got horns and a beard under its chin and I’m sure he’s male until the little one reaches under and butts her udders, fat with milk, and starts sucking. My oldest kid and I stroke her greasy hide. She seems gentle enough.
September 1982Fiction
Sermon On The Rat
Do you have a dog? he asks me. I say no, and he says well that’s good because dogs shed so much. And do you have cats? I say no. And he says well, you might think about getting one, they’re always good to keep the mice down. I don’t think too much about that until I start cleaning out the kitchen cabinets and find a spring trap about a foot long, large enough to cripple a horse.
September 1982Fiction
Outfielder
Coggins walked through an afternoon fog as soft and gray-white as his own hair. He had walked a half mile or so nearly every day for twenty years — at first on the advice of a doctor who had repaired his heart, and then later because it became his deepest habit, and broke the day.
September 1982Fiction
Scribe Of The Imperial Memory
It is typhoon season in Japan. The wind rips raveningly at the grass roofs and scatters bales of hay across the fields. It buries the land beneath torrents and pools and knocks down the drenched passersby as they strive for home.
August 1982Fiction
Some Joke, Huh?
My brother is weird. I never know what he’s going to do next. Like the time he decides around three o’clock on an August afternoon that he’s going to climb the Franklin Mountains.
August 1982Fiction
Precedent
In 1975 I came to love Faye Henry. She was thirty-five years older than I and necessary for my mother, who had no friends at Harvard until she and Faye Henry fell asleep together in the back of “Practicum in Ethnographic Futures Research,” knew they were destined to be friends, and have been ever since.
July 1982Fiction
At The End Of The Fiscal Year
Ten months prior to being eligible for his company’s pension and benefit plan, after almost twenty years, Ben Ross was fired.
June 1982Fiction
Celluloid Children
Grandma was a person of the Middle Kingdom. The center of civilized life. With one hand she propped up a star-gazer, and with the other she reached down to the bowels of life to offer a hand to the lost and bewildered.
June 1982Fiction
Black Reaper
We couldn’t have been more delighted, Buck and I, he in the warm arms of Mr. Boston, me in the warm arms of life in the sunny south, at a time when the shadows were hazy, the sunshine was bright, and the smell of the newly cropped bermuda grass touched my nostrils, and the days awaited me breathlessly, endlessly.
May 1982
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