The Princess of Pop remembered being a kid back in Louisiana on her cousins’ wide wooden swing, climbing so high that with one release of the chain links she might sail off into the clouds...
My mother found me living a new life on an island off the coast of Maine where a lighthouse on a rocky finger of land sheltered my solitude. A society designed to preserve the past had offered me refuge in exchange for being present, for walking on floors and opening doors, for filling musty rooms with my breath. I was the lighthouse caretaker...
When I carved a rose the size of my palm to give to her, a sliver of stone flew into my right eye and carved it out. Well, I still had one eye and the feeling in two hands and heart. She allowed me to kiss her but nothing more.
What Rachel didn’t know about the letters she wrote to Private First Class Moralez was that sometimes he ate them. He would read them from beginning to end and then he would lick the paper. He would run his finger along the jagged edges where Rachel had torn the paper from her spiral notebook, imagining her fingers pulling on the page and the tightly coiled metal resisting as it ripped.
He reeked of sweat and wine and rotting fish, and so did everyone else who sat shivering and trapped in the gristled black of the beast. The man squatted alone in his tweed rags to prod the thick shallows with a sharpened pole. He waited, silver-haired and asthmatic with his hands shaking and coralled over in splinters. He couldn't see a thing, there, in that sweating dark.
Miriam and Dorothy are just getting to be best girlfriends again. They hadn’t spoken for a while over a silly disagreement about some money Dorothy had loaned her. Then Charlie, Miriam’s second husband, got drunk and shot himself.
To get to my job at the Quick ‘n Easy convenience store, I would cut behind the Catholic school, through the Chevy lot where my father used to work, and down the stretch of St. Mary’s Avenue that was squeezed between the old folks’ home and the cemetery.
Her lips were in that famous downward turn, her eyes lowered and dreamy. She brought a delicate hand to her forehead and pushed a white-blond, perfect curl away from her cheek. Hers was the saddest face I’d ever seen.