1. Commerce with Children The stick is our first best friend. Clutched like hands, sticks are the most constant of companions to tots as well as bigger boys and girls. A stick is a weapon, a guide, an aid to walking, a pointer, a building material, a javelin—and more. Sticks obey our commands and adapt […]
Though it’s a long time since I’ve lived in a house, I still have memories about what that used to be like which work on me constantly, mainly subconsciously. When I dream, I open a door into a composite domicile cobbled together from bits and pieces of all the houses my parents passed through during […]
A garden is a beautiful place to die. It was the only beautiful thing about Clara’s death, which otherwise was a bullet and a broken chest, blood spilling over everything, the red scent of iron. Had he been there, he might have vomited. Only might, because the revulsion he felt for death had lessened a […]
It’s Sunday, and we’re drawing lots in the church hall. The vicar calls them straws, but really they’re only strips of paper. He shows them, each time, before we start: most are longer than his middle finger, a few—two, three, never more than six—are shorter than his thumb. Today, three are short. He fans the […]
You love Dr. Markoff. You have always loved Dr. Markoff, even before the film began. He is unlike any man you have ever met. Have you met many other men? It is so difficult to remember. His hair is black as jet. His eyes are as deep as night. When he speaks in his low […]
It’s the end of summer, the evenings only just starting to turn cold. He doesn’t join me for tea again today, so I spend my time beading by the window, stringing bead after bead after bead, my eyes straining against the failing light, the tips of my fingers raw. Cook finishes her chores and joins […]
Markos Koszjan sits alone on Halloween night and watches himself on the heavy wood-sided TV. On the screen, he is a darkened monolith, his black suit an empty doorway that sucks up all the light, tapering from his broad shoulders to his waist, naturally narrow and cinched tighter by an unseen girdle. At the ends […]
A month after Danielle Haas was buried, the cemetery caretaker Mr. Wolf was found dead on the grounds with a rake in his hand and an awful look on his face like he’d just seen the Devil, or so the rumor went at school. Everybody was so convinced that he’d met the ghost of Lady […]
I Runs Two bodies lie twined in afterglow. Sunlight falls across sweaty skin. The man is young and generously furred, his belly a little soft. The woman is strikingly beautiful. Her nonchalant draping of herself across the white sheets in oblivious sleep looks like something that should be filmed. This is Ngozi, fifth wife of […]
Once the waxy dusk went black, the color rotting away behind distant mountains Claudette might never see again, the men in red coats came to work down in the narrow road. This was the third night they had done so. They huddled there between the decaying building and the newer one, around some obscure task. […]
