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Fiction
My Father’s Grandson
I called my father at his bank in Tulsa. He wasn’t there, as usual, so I left a message with his secretary, as usual. “Tell him, Helouise, that he has a new grandson.” I had to repeat the message twice, as Helouise was well aware that I was an only child and quite unmarried.
January 1983Tales Of Lord Shantih
One day the Lord Shantih threw a coin down a wishing well. He wished for another coin. Later, as he walked upon the road, he found a coin.
November 1982Stories
I once visited a man who had just checked into Room 111 of an old hotel. He knew neither letters nor numbers. A friend asked his room number. “I’m in the room with three sticks,” he said.
November 1982Around 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 1982The 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 1982Sermon 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 1982Outfielder
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 1982Scribe 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 1982Some 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 1982Precedent
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 1982
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