Having bought a Sunday paper, I stood sipping coffee in our village store, absently staring through the plate glass window onto the street. I was conscious of the affable buzz of my neighbors’ palaver all around me. I couldn’t catch specifics of any conversation but I didn’t really try. As I age, I crave such […]
Rapt, an old man inspects his living room mirror but not for his image. Instead, its angle subtly reflects the light of a stub of candle on the silent piano. He might say the reflection shimmers but the years, though blessed, have jaded him some. He’d rather avoid such a hackneyed word but he’s […]
When he fetched the morning paper, he read of the would-be bomber wrestled down by fellow travelers. A mile in the air, but nothing exploded, the man merely scorched his own shins. Here icicles fall and bleed on the ground, his metal roof pings, day yawns. He yawns at a crossword: 22 Down, Ram’s Ma’am. […]
I smacked my foot against a table leg this morning and scolded myself: Watch where you’re going! A blood-bead stood below the nail, whose jaundiced color puzzled our grandson, here for the weekend. He asked, “Grandpa, how come you’re gold?” But he quickly turned his attention to that little globe of blood. Our interest in […]
He spoke of how one day he tried to find distraction by cleaning out his attic. As though he could. Up there he came upon his son’s toy Tonka tractor, pocked by rust. It seemed a relic from an ancient age but something too the boy might use right then. As though he could. “That […]
Pure quiet in the room, but for tat-tat-tat– sparks from your fireplace against the flue. You imagine they seek escape, as you did in yesterday’s early morning vision, which let you rise high, for instance, above the frame of that winter-killed deer. When you chanced upon it on foot last week, the bones had somehow […]
There’s always been discourse between us. It’s never seemed less than crucial, but once the children grew, its range began to grow too, and it started to stray from the normal, if such a thing exists. For years we’ve assumed, for instance, those maples down by the pond were red ones, common as pavement. Then […]
The whole thing mystified me at age fifteen. Knocking on eighty’s door, I’m a lot less mystified. I’m less troubled too, though I must allow that the event still leaves me strangely uneasy. I’d been walking back from the school ball field. We couldn’t get enough boys together for an actual game, so we just […]
He beholds a ragged windrow of snow, dull remnant, and wonders if drink or dope might not kiss him and make him better. The writer knows they wouldn’t, couldn’t, or hopes he knows it, hopes he’ll recall the gloom and sometimes utter madness he left in his wake, for him and all. The windrow is […]
All of a sudden, a crowd, most of us pretty much strangers, which seems to me– well, strange: our village and others here in this stretch of valley are tiny. But John, who’s been the chief of the volunteer fire department for years, shows up exactly as the ambulance crew appears. I do know John. […]