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Castaway

The bar is everything a bar should be. The lighting is dim and soothing, only the wooden bar and colored bottles gleam, and the bartender is a soft-spoken, soft-moving man with a golden beard.

Heritage Clay

Her fingers caressed her statue. She pressed her thumbs into the woman’s forehead. Her beloved clay was soft and cool and oily. Her mother had willed her the clay. Heritage clay. Ninety years old. “It will mold your life,” her mother had said. Now Dorothy’s life threatened the clay. Her hand was too heavy.

The Pure In Heart

The voice is unmistakable. At the first intonation, the first rolling syllable, Swain wakes, feeling the murmuring life of each of a million cells. Each of them all at once. He feels the line where his two lips touch, the fingers of his left hand pressed against his leg, the spears of wet grass against the flat soles of his feet, the gleaming half-circles of tears that stand in his eyes. His own bone marrow hums inside him like colonies of bees. He feels the breath pouring in and out of him, through the damp, red passages of his skull. Then in the slow way that fireworks die, the knowledge fades. He is left again with his surfaces and the usual vague darkness within. He turns back around to see if Julie has heard.

Sunbeams

The family is a good institution because it is uncongenial. The men and women who, for good reasons and bad, revolt against the family, are, for good reasons and bad, revolting against mankind. Aunt Elizabeth is unreasonable, like mankind. Papa is excitable, like mankind. Our younger brother is mischievous, like mankind. Grandpapa is stupid, like the world; he is old, like the world.

G.K. Chesterton

The Shadow’s Speed

Circles

The women of my life stand in a full circle around me, waiting for me to choose among them. The clothes and expression and posture of each woman recall a particularly intense moment in our lives together. I look into their eyes and see them pleading. This is my dream and my nightmare.

Life And Death

A cold rain beat on the canopy over the grave site. John pulled down the brim of the walking hat she’d gotten him on their ramblings through Ireland. Just before he stepped under the canopy, he glanced up at the sky and recalled when his father had died.

The Love Story

We swore to do it till death do us part and neither of us crossed our fingers. That, in itself, was rather a miracle. We were hardly speaking at the time. “I will” was a long conversation.

Sunbeams

The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

Milkweed