Mesha
descended the stairs, careful not to slip on the hardwood. In his jetlagged daze he could feel the mystical silence of the
morning sunshine flooding the empty house through ...
Hanna was born and raised southern Baptist, but she
wanted to be a nun. Her first habit consisted of a black cloth that she tied
around her head for a ...
“He took another deep, soulful breath. The smells were vivid, they carried with them a cascade of memories. Little fingers trying to knot the silk cord of the bag […]”
Photo Credit: Charles Rattray
He wonders whether it was the child or the old man in him that led him to do it, or whether it was the sentimentality that he ...
The
trail carved into the woods at an angle, so that after walking just a few yards
their view of the house with its armor of moss-matted shingles and fieldstone ...
Photo Credit: Mark Gallacher.
1967–1991
You’ve been talking again.
What about?
The past.
It’s all I’ve got. Anyway. Aren’t the dying allowed
to rant?
*
Thursday nights, we played table tennis in the
Progress Hall. ...
Why did I agree to go to the party?
Chi with his hot hands on the small of my back seduced me. Over my head, I
slipped on a gold ...
The fire
progressed steadily through the tall pines and up the long valley in the
Sawtooth mountains north of Boise. All but one of the cabins had been
evacuated. Fire ...
“Would
you delete this patron record for me” – a library supervisor’s request to Help
Desk sounded simple. The supervisor apparently couldn’t get rid of a redundant
entry herself. This ...
Puddles
reflected car lights like winking windows. Adriana scurried through the rain,
looking for the address of the agency. When she found it, she sheltered in the
building entrance to ...
The fair is crowded. The fair is noisy. My
anxiety level is skyrocketing. We wade with linked arms through farm animal
stink, sweaty hicks eating chili dogs at picnic tables, ...
The Welcome
I
hold my mother’s hands in mine, her skin coarse, fingers thicker than I
remember them. She still manicures her nails, the bright colour clashing with
the marks left ...
I first saw her at a book burning. It was her eyes. That wild orange they reflected.
A journalist returns to the graffiti scene of his youth when a mysterious tag appears on a wall opposite his apartment.
I shouldn’t be telling you any of this, Carl, but I know I can trust you.
I must have flailed my arms convincingly because she seemed happy, though you could never tell with Tina. An angel at a party and on the way home a shit-tongued ...
We prized ourselves on our reliability, our most solid trait. On top of that, she was a whiner; a big-time needer. She even took seconds.
The city seemed like another world then, bristling with possibilities. Every evening and every weekend was the brink of some discovery.
“I’m against the bombing, even if it is that damned Islamic State,” the old man yelled over the whipping wind,
Picture Credits: Roman Koval
‘Although, officially, the Spanish Civil War ended on April 1, 1939, armed resistance against Franco and his regime was not over. In the 1940s groups of ...