stories

  • Crossing

    The nation is oversized, he thought. He was in the back seat of an Uber heading for the airport. Outside there were lanes of traffic, a sprawling west coast city, and street corners he would never know. He had, over many decades, drifted far from home. Now, he must cross the Great Divide to get… Continue reading

  • In far-flung waiting rooms

    There’s a small, square-shaped waiting room on one of the upper floors where the unseen departments are located. The specialized units and consultants. The parts of a tall hospital that patients prefer never to know. In this far-flung waiting room, there are eleven seats arranged in two short rows of five facing the door, with… Continue reading

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  • Blame it on Monsieur Tournier

    We met on a tube train, would you believe. She and I boarded the same Northern Line train at Embankment station, though we had not noticed one another on the platform. It was past ten on a weeknight and the carriage was almost empty, yet she sat directly opposite. It’s true what they say. We… Continue reading

  • A Relic of Bygone Days

    I live out west in a place made by the Gold Rush. Call me Absalom Townsend, for instance. Think of me as Absalom, sepia-toned founder of a mining town called Rough and Ready.[1] Picture me as Absalom, once described by a Rough and Ready local as “very helpful to girls and carries them.” I guess… Continue reading

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  • A Chocolate-covered Raisins Story

    “My, your Janey’s a clever one, isn’t she?” said my mother right in front of me, although she was only agreeing with the other moms drinking coffee at Janey’s house that summer morning.   Nah, Janey was just a great pretender. Everybody thought she could read at a precociously early age, but I knew she… Continue reading

  • A Graveyard Tale

    A brother and two sisters make their way down a steep bank at the edge of the graveyard. The brother, leading the way, holds two plastic pouches in one hand by pinching the top of them between his fingers and thumb, while steadying himself with his other hand by grasping one loose branch after another.… Continue reading

  • Special Angels

    That’s Janey in the middle. The photo was taken in 1959 when she was five years old. Janey started early with the girly stuff. You know what I mean. Watching herself from outside. Preparing for a life of being watched. At one time, I might have blamed the mother. Not anymore. Janey was who she… Continue reading

  • Belle Isle Aquarium

    “Mother?” Plump, magnified, younger lips open and close. “Mother?” How many years must she hear it? Mother Mother Mother. How many years already? The lips are those of a luminous fish suspended in water when it ceases to swim back and forth. A fish that hangs in eerie silence, mouth dropping open and then locking upward as… Continue reading

  • Sugarbush Lake: then, later, and the yet to come

    It’s dry and hot, 95 plus. Kay has pulled her car off the road and is walking the gravel lane following the eastern edge of Sugarbush Lake. Her dog, a yellow mutt called Sally, darts in and out of the woods. By high summer here in western Michigan, the trees and undergrowth are dense between… Continue reading

  • The Threshold God

    1 “The houses that were lost forever continue to live on in us…they insist in us in order to live again, as though they expected us to give them a supplement of living.”* I liked to throw a baseball against the house, aiming as close to the side door as I dared and catching the… Continue reading

  • Start

    Sleepless, I turn away from the undented expanse of your side of the bed. Your pillow, now an icy mound. The outward effects of your act. Your act won’t change or fade or grow relative and fathomable over time. Your act restates itself as blankly today as it did yesterday and as it will do… Continue reading

  • The People in the Apartment Building

    Then, the people in the apartment building upped and went. No one saw it coming. It was as though a viral mist had entered the place, drifted up the stairwells and onto the upper floors and corridors to seep beneath the door to each apartment, cloud the rooms, and affect all who lived there. Their… Continue reading

  • Something(s) Known All Along

    When Kay is restless, sleepless, between tasks, or when her spirits are low, she thinks of her ‘self’ as an agitated other who cannot be banished but must be temporarily quieted or forgotten. “I forget myself,” she says, “in archives.” Pretty much any random archive seems to serve her purpose, as long as it is… Continue reading

  • Wherever You Are

    So, ‘the light falls differently’ on memories each time we return to them. Big surprise. Yet, Kay is bothered by this. She says it adds to her general unreliability. I tell her that if she is writing to be seen as reliable, then this is the wrong project. She is worried about the ‘changing light’… Continue reading

  • Light Falling Differently

    “You don’t like your Dad much, do you Kay?” Audra spoke this line as though it were a light-hearted tease or private family joke, but I heard a tinge of resentment in her voice and in the remark itself. Why else would the remark have stayed with me for more than half a century? There… Continue reading

  • Lockwood, Nelly, and Clare

    “You’re Lockwood to my Nelly,” Kay said to me yesterday. “What?” “You know, Mr. Lockwood and Nelly Dean! The frame narrators in Wuthering Heights. Lockwood is the tenant of Thrushcross Grange who asks Nelly Dean, the housekeeper, to tell him the story of Catherine and Heathcliff which he relays to the reader. And by the… Continue reading

  • Some Kind of Boat

    Allow me to introduce you to Kay because, without her, I might never have come across the histories of Jake and Audra. Kay is a dedicated and caring narrator, but she is ‘unreliable’ in the classic sense of the term.[1] I might add that you should probably consider me to be equally unreliable. I am,… Continue reading

  • Rivers That Ran Through Every Day

    Kay stores her old negatives in sleeves like these. There is a deep stack of them in a cardboard box together with some contact sheets. The box is heavy. She has transported it from one place to another, across nations and oceans, for more than thirty years. One winter’s day, she opens the box, removes… Continue reading

  • Margy’s Song

    It comes to an end by the mailbox. But the end holds the beginning and the beginning always searches for the end. The man, his name is Raymond, begins life in 1925. He lives until this warm month of May 2012. His doctor always says he’ll get him to 90 years, while Ray jokes that… Continue reading

  • The Three of Us

    Part one: 2012 reunion Three It happened in the summer of 1962. That’s one thing the three of us agree on. We don’t recall the date or month, although Carol says it must have been a Sunday. Otherwise, her dad would not have been around, she says. He sure was around that day. Anyway, it was a… Continue reading