We use cookies to improve our services and remember your choices for future visits. For more information see our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Independent, Reader-Supported Publishing
Browse Topics
Companion Animals
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Wicked Birds
The Saturday my fingers were mauled I distinctly recall black birds everywhere. They clung to the electrical wires that draped from the several small outbuildings to the large red barn in the center of the farm. The birds called from the walnut trees and hopped among the combed-over swatches of fescue in the steaming pasture.
June 2003
Fiction
Aphelion
Everyone hated that dog. Every time my friends and I walked by the Hanson house, it was there, chained to a basketball pole at the far end of the long driveway: a huge retriever-mutt-thing, a hundred-and-some-odd pounds of pissed-off mange.
May 2003
Fiction
The Word
On the weekends she stayed with him, the first sound she heard in the morning was the meowing of his cat. The people in the apartment next door also had a cat, only theirs was put out overnight; his was strictly an indoor cat, black and nearly a dozen years old and just beginning to turn fat. The next-door cat always came to its owner’s front porch and yowled to be let in. His crouched in the bedroom window, peering down, and the two cats carried on a conversation until the next-door cat went inside.
February 2003Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Cynthia
Most people thought Cynthia was crazy — and perhaps she was. Isn’t it crazy to park your car (a black 1958 Oldsmobile with a large, garish strawberry painted on the passenger door) anywhere you want to: on curbs, lawns, sidewalks? To sleep three hours a night and eat a stick of butter for dinner?
September 2002
Sy Safransky’s Notebook
May 2001
I’m here in the early-morning darkness, a congregation of one. I’m here, just one more man who thinks he deserves God’s ear, as if God had time for everyone who reached out. I’m here, reaching.
May 2001Quotations
Sunbeams
April 2001I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls, and they say, “Because it’s such a beautiful animal.” There you go. Well, I think my mother’s attractive, but I have photographs of her.
Fiction
The Year In Geese
I reached again, beyond the orange bill, behind the round eyes, and slid my hand lightly down his delicate downy neck. He stood absolutely still. I could almost feel a sigh in him, and I passed my hand again and again down this fragile stem of life, then out onto the fan of feathers across his back, the narrow spiny ridges and silken expanse.
January 2001
Subscribe & SaveSAVE 52%
Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
Subscribe Today