The clicking of my boots was the only thing keeping me sane. It acted as a metronome counting the steps until all of the anticipation flashed before me. The concrete had been freshly paved, and yet I felt bumps in my path. My shoulders ached and became full of anxiety as I approached the door. I held the book under my right arm; it was my dominant and lucky one.
The wind was from the northeast. A cold wind blowing light and steady with the predictability of winter coming on. It was late October. You knew winter was coming hard and there was no escaping it. You just had to bear it.
The man was in his early fifties and needed a shave, the stubble just showing on his cheeks. His broad face and blinking eyes were set to the wind and had a curious look of detachment.
When Antonio was around nine years old, shortly after his father’s murder, the young boy discovered not only that he was a child of sin, but also that God would be a mighty rival for the attention of his mother. For the rest of his life, Antonio would remember the macabre scene of his father Arsenio’s rotting body…
This bathroom, shared with a dozen others. Now, three years on, she’d pause in this bathroom. To retrieve that spike of energy when, finally, after interviews and tests, she secured her right to live in this building. To know its ways. To share this bathroom.
L-shaped, the shower far back in the alcove. The slant to the drain steep enough to alert bare toes. The basin’s obese taps with Hot and Cold in foxed enamel. Their bolts and washers industrial and gleaming.
The pain, this feeling of inadequacy, is there with you, and although the seed of it was never recognized as a seed belonging to it, as a seed made of it—pain—they planted it still, in your making, ignorance at the center of their factice bliss, this justification—they didn’t know; did their best.
Mariana Huaman had worked with the Flores family since Rosa was an infant and had been the one to witness the first miracle, the one that occurred on June 17, 1586. Now Mariana is approaching Rosa on her deathbed and remembers that distant day as if it had just happened.
Eleanor Saravak studied the three news story drafts spread across her wooden desktop. Each one of them sported its own headline. Headlines that ought to boast so much bite and venom they may as well leap off the page and send folks six feet under.
Not that Eleanor joined the news biz to do her readers in or feed them dreck made of letters put together.
There’s life on other planets, and we’re fighting again.
Not so much fighting each other, me and Hazel, but rather the hundred little obstacles we confront daily in the world: electric bills, uninsured vehicles, the price of groceries—it’s a love language in itself that we’re each willing to be the other’s proxy for all these petty aggravations.
When the need for this routine is exhausted, from my phone I will play serious, dramatic music like Vivaldi or some Dies Irae thundering, and we will each see how long we can continue arguing. It’s become a playlist of losing first-smirks.
Alice couldn’t remember her dream, but the thought that lingered after waking shook her. She had nothing to give him.
She had fallen asleep on the couch, not easily or accidentally, had forced herself to sleep, exhausted herself with praying and reciting the memorized routes that would take them to their new home. She pictured the highlighted maps from AAA with her eyes closed, stacked in the glove compartment in the order they would need them.
There were still pieces of the dream, but she disregarded them…. It was still so early that her young siblings had not yet jumped out of bed to come raid the stockings or shake the presents that they would open after breakfast.
When Othello first arrived, my grandmother declared that he should be called Prince, but she soon changed her mind and named him after the Moor who killed his wife Desdemona because he was sure that she had betrayed him. When I asked her why she had changed the dog’s name to Othello, she responded that it was an appropriate name because his hair was black as vicuñas wool and because he was fiercely jealous.
Miss Beulah was not worried about a few dead feral cats, especially the ones that had lived for years in her woodpile before they met their sanguinary demise. She had discovered them gruesomely slaughtered with violent gashes to their necks just after a weak, late autumn hurricane had wreaked havoc on her yard and flooded her collard patch. Apart from believing that a bobcat had done the killing, her only real concern was removing the corpses from her yard. But a week later …
June 1941
“Get up,” I whisper, crouching on the concrete, grasping the bars with fingers picked raw and bloody. I consider rapping the bars with the key — the precious key!— but I don’t dare. The guard might be a light sleeper.
A simple choice can make all the difference in the world, or so they say. Mary knew what some of the major choices in her life had been. She chose to go to nursing school, despite being told by everyone in her life that she wouldn’t be able to handle it, but she knew that she could. When Hiram got down on one knee, she chose to say yes, although she doubted that they were ready for marriage.
Searching his reflection in the mirror, the sailor saw a subtle change in his own expression. What he saw was longing – a face of someone pursued by memories, haunted by a future he did not want. Now he could see that same expression in others. He thought at first it was enough to know he was not alone, but he realized he had to do something with the insight he had gained. He decided to leave behind his regular life…
“Every black man of genius will eventually be destroyed,” said the Nuyorican widower Irving Rivera as he puffed on a Winston cigarette in the university cafeteria soon after he learned Pedro Albizu Campos had been buried in the Old San Juan Cemetery one hot summer day in 1965.
“Such is the destiny of every ambitious man of African blood wherever and whenever the Anglo-Saxon rules. It shouldn’t surprise you, Susana.
Buddy Morris was moving the last of his stuff out of our cabin and into his old Buick, ready to head down to Denver. He was planning to help friends there open a new music venue, the Harmony Café. I wasn’t going with him.
I was hoping to get the goodbyes over with quickly, but no such luck. Buddy kept pausing his packing to give me advice: where to take the truck if it broke down again, which pile of firewood was best to use first. On and on.
Perhaps these notes will help explain the events of the past few weeks, so that not everything I have been witnessing will be lost to speculation and hearsay. Maybe I’ll be back in due time and will tear up these pages with deep embarrassment; I will cut ties with Ethan and refer him to one of my colleagues. Though, should he ever be allowed to tell his side of the story, everyone in my profession will shake their heads and use my case to warn their disciples against grotesque transgressions.
Bold charcoal lines slithered across the canvas of the huntress’s blue gaze. Her fingers dipped into the inky mixture, then ran thick, twin nocturnal serpents under her blackberry-stained bottom lip and down her chin. Her framed eyes glinted with raw focus as she worked, fully immersed in the ancient custom meant to intensify deep forest vision, connecting her to the fire that bore the dark origin of this war paint and to the fierce spirit of the hunt.
Clement shivered. Rain fell heavy, filling the runnels on either side of the bridge’s supports. He surveyed his home in the dim light of the evening, reaching, feeling for the tent, his clothes and sleeping bag. His neighbors had left, fearing the predictions: the river would soon crawl up the bank and sweep everything to the bay. He looked up at the underside of a steel beam, an arm’s length from his head. The river spoke in a rush at his feet. He must leave his carved-out dirt space of a home.
Barnaby kept finding me dates, friends of friends, or friends of friends of friends—those kinds of connections, which is how I discovered that he needed better friends, and better friends of friends.
Audra asked me to dance as soon as we got to the bar. “But I don’t know how to line dance,” I protested, and she insisted I could pick it up quickly. I did.
Mother Teresa did what she always did when she found Jesus in distressing disguise. She rolled up her sleeves and got to work. This time she found the Christ in a twenty-year-old Puerto Rican youth from the Bronx, already in the advanced stages of AIDS, nearly blind and with lesions from Kaposi’s Sarcoma all over his body. His father was sitting on a chair next to Francisco, silently weeping.
“Why do you say Felipillo is a savage? Sure, he likes to eat with his hands, and he doesn’t speak perfect Castilian, but there is nothing cruel or barbaric about him. Father Dominguez told me savages drink human blood and sacrifice children to their gods. Felipillo has never done anything like that. And neither have his people.”
Mariana Rodriguez Salazar thought George Hickenlooper was being foolhardy and perhaps delusional when he told her he had decided to issue a public proclamation the next day in Managua’s central plaza and that he intended to send copies to be posted in the capitals of all the other Central American republics. As he read it to her, Mariana was sure her little dwarf was laying the groundwork for his own death.
“GEORGE HICKENLOOPER THE GREAT FILIBUSTER HEREBY ANNOUNCES THAT HE IS THE PRESIDENT OF THE CONFEDERATE STATES OF CENTRAL AMERICA, ALSO KNOWN AS THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF CENTRAL AMERICA…”
Todd—I have looked over the latest materials the DA sent you. You must be desperate! Are you sure this is everything? As you know, I scoured the depositions and interrogatories last week, and Phil has my report on those. Did you guys even talk to each other? How are you planning to defend Mrs. Bierman?