The nurse standing behind him tucked a strand of dark hair into her lavender hijab before grasping the rail on the back of his gurney. “Gib” Gibson and his surgeon had been discussing the modern hospital building that was under construction while they waited for an operating theatre here in the old one. The stony turrets and false battlements of this showy Victorian relic on the Montréal skyline would soon be put to some new purpose.
Victims of automobile accidents often report that at the moment of impact time seems to move in slow motion. I now understand what they experience. For one protracted fraction of a second time stood still. The din of the spectators faded to a distant thunder in my ears. My gloved hand crept skywards.
She lived alone in the woods.
As far as anyone knew, it was just nature beyond the Clifton Wilderness Park’s Welcome Center. Trees and mosquitos and dirt. What else was there to it? Hikers might enjoy the crisp air and momentary escape from their day-to-day life, which they termed “becoming one with nature.”
Any of the stories about why we left could be true, but I gravitate toward the one about the middle-aged father threatening to drive the Jeep off a cliff. I don’t know whether he imagined his family in the vehicle with him. The little boys wouldn’t have been wearing seatbelts in 1979. The infant would have been crying in her mother’s weak arms.
Carson Rawlings, attorney for the late Miriam McShanahan for over twenty years, waited for Trapp to stop laughing at his mother’s burial request. Trapp sat dwarfing a brown leather chair across from his desk. Carson leaned forward, fingertips pressed together, hands tented, glaring at Trapp. Trapp continued giggling. Carson sighed. “I remember the hilarity of my own mother’s passing,” he said.
I used to see Michael’s father nearly every day. He would be sitting on the steps of a church at the corner of Chestnut and Central, his face turned squarely into the bright sun and his eyes would be closed. He could be getting a suntan except that if you wait long enough you see that he periodically drops his head into his hands and remains like that, head bowed and cradled, his shoulders occasionally shaking. He looks like a statue…
Amaryllis stood in the rain, squinting at the little blue dot on her phone that showed her location. The cracked screen was barely readable, and the rain didn’t help. It was the correct address all right, and nicer than where most auditions were held. The lobby was very warm and very posh, with doormen, a security desk, and turnstiles that allowed entry only when security pressed a button.
A declaration from the district office
we will not be teaching cursive this year
no pens will be required, no extra paper
we will not be teaching cursive this year.
In 1979 or so
Soviet-French
interplanetary
cooperation
(which boasted,
inter alia,
French scientific
tackle lugged
to Mars by the
USSR in 1971)
nearly hit
a new high
with an idea;
As a species, humans
live their lives in degrees
of alarm. Mostly, for most
of us, there isn’t much.
The world spins exactly
as we have come to expect it,
and caught wherever
we are,
a wobbling chin and her deserted glance hit the floor
in agony where we stood together while we chanted
misery: “you’re an ordinary man.” her mouth wrenched
an unforgettable sound cataclysmic eruption of scattered
emotions, broken speeches, tired and beaten hope
we were once before and not anymore but why
My mother’s pots of rosemary were tall, manicured
cones, broom swept earthy smelling evergreen,
flecked with lavender drops of blossoms
the shape of small hearts or lips,
she’d send me outside to retrieve a stem each time
she baked a chicken
I was a tourist from honey-milk land,
and Sister heard my question underneath.
She had her own.
“Are you packing?”
That kind of place.
The nun hugged her wizened chest.
She was old then,
dead now, I’m sure, thirty years on.
Every Friday, while co-workers are out for their weekly happy hour, Meg sits in bed, her ticket perched on her keyboard, combing through design ideas on the internet while the local newscaster announces lottery numbers. One at a time, the numbered table-tennis balls appear on the screen.
First, gather the apples. After the neighbors move out, in the seclusion of nightfall, crawl with your little sister beneath a gap dug by their brown dog underneath the fence between their yard and yours. Shimmy on your belly like a snake. Once you are safely inside their abandoned homestead, reach up to take a large bowl your mother hands you over the wooden fence posts.
Edgar thought they’d travel in a chartered jet. He’d never flown on one before, but he knew the Company used them when they needed feet on the ground ASAP. Cantor Fitzgerald was the Company’s biggest client, generating millions in revenue each year, which he figured would make them charter worthy.
Three statues stand together at the edge of the tree line. Alert, deliberately calm, they look in the same direction, though not precisely at the same place. Boonie-rats. Grunts.
They are looking, always will be looking at The Wall: a great gash of black stone slabs in a green civilian lawn. A carefully shaped pile of black sand.
First, there was Roses. She met him more than 30 years ago, at her second research job. Now, when they saw each other, he always brought her a single rose.
Roses, 6:16 a.m.: “I know this: You and I belong together. We have a beautiful future before us.”
Then, there was Wine. She broke up with him when she was 36. That was 23 years ago.
Black. Yellow. Blue. The painting in the hall showed a man, a woman, and a big yellow dog Ð falling from the Earth into the atmosphere. The dog looked so helpless as he fell with his legs spread out, away from green earth and blue oceans toward the blackened sky. The thick strokes of paint gave the images an added dimension Ð as if the paint was also falling away from the wooden frame. Even then, at the tender age of nine, I was most concerned about the dog.
The day he arrived started off as usual as any for Pru. It was late spring. She stood by the stove in the summer kitchen, boiling water to wash Miss Vena’s petticoats and undergarments. Old Janie, who worked at the Moffatts’ neighboring farm, sat at the large wooden table gossiping with Aunt Betty, Pru’s father’s sister, who was Miss Vena’s cook.
I stood in the hallway of the African Hotel in Tunis wearing a bathrobe and sandals unsure which way to turn. Flanked on both sides by large ornate doors encrusted with mosaics of translucent tiles artfully lettering something in Arabic, I had no idea where to go. At front desk, using my mostly forgotten college French, IÕd inquired about the spa (la source mineral) initially uncertain whether I would be directed to a steam room or rock quarry.
Max Toffer was pretty much everything I wanted to be. A newspaper columnist, an author of fiction and nonfiction, a devoted advocate of the First Amendment. He was from Philadelphia before he moved to New York to become a Greenwich Village institution at The Oracle. I learned all I knew about Toffer from the about-the-author paragraphs at the back of the novel of his I just finished
Nine-year-old Liz Walters knew the old playscape was off-limits and had been for years. She hadn’t planned to climb the ladder. This was just going to be a reconnaissance mission.
By mid-afternoon on a Friday in late August, she’d crossed Johnson’s cow pasture and was standing behind the closed-up village school, contemplating the sad condition of its abandoned playground.
Logan began looking for his friends as he waited to make a left turn at the gate. The corporate headquarters stood behind a gleaming white iron fence that stretched for furlongs. He followed four black Navigators down the long-curved driveway.
The parade of cars stopped at the valet, which gave him time to scan for the one belonging to the people he knew.