Excerpts
Creation Myth
Overgrown weeds had hidden the car untilthe brushfire revealed it. Once the doors cooled,neighborhood kids came to investigate. One rubbeda circle clear with his sleeve and clicked his glassesagainst the window. A beautiful woman layagainst the seat—black dress, sparklesaround her neck, confetti in her hair.Next to her sat a man in a tuxedo,a noisemaker stuck …
Jose Saramago. The Lives of Things. Verso Press.
Originally released in 1978 as Objecto Quase, the recently re-released The Lives of Things is an intriguing collection of short stories written by Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago, perhaps Portugal’s most famous, if not most rebellious, author. While best known for his relatively recent novels The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991), Blindness (1995), and …
The Divine Auditor
It is still dark when my cell phone begins to buzz. When I flip it open, my mother’s voice comes through a connection often interrupted by the apartment building’s iron girders. We make some awkward small talk and then she says: “I guess you want to talk about the email you sent me last …
Time in the Sierras Subbéticas
All week a caretaker started hacking the hillside with his weed whacker at dawn. Its fierce buzz drove us, bleary with olive pollen and summer heat, out to walk through groves and whitewashed village homes as the sun rose. On the foothills road we stepped aside for a baker’s pickup, its load of fresh loaves …
stop-&-frisk
-&-what- does-it-take- to-cooperate- -shrink- into-an-apology -turn-over- your-body -turn-out- your-pockets -be-a-right-answer- to-questions -they-choose -be- chosen
Husband Fair
for Matthew, darling How good to lay with my husband in our stone flat with not enough windows and many doors. We need another chair. The smaller table wobbles too much for books and won’t hold both of our plates. But we eat, he and I, and the fare is good. I do the …
Horror Story
My niece’s classmate kept a pet snake coiled next to her in bed. One night, the girl found the snake stretched out straight along her side. She thought it was sick and took it to a vet who said, “It’s not ill. It’s trying to measure when it’s long enough to …
Wrong Number
The phone rings, and it’s a woman with her backbone up because she knows—don’t think she doesn’t—that I was with her man last night. Better keep myself distant from him, she warns, better stay away from her Buzzard, or else she’ll be forced to put the hurt on me, swear to God, just see if …
Fight, Bull
A friend of mine, a longhaired, bearded carpenter, told me a story about a time he boarded a city bus in Fresno, California, and nearly resorted to violence —the kind of violence they write stories about in the daily paper. Your memory isn’t even working normally. It could happen to you or to me. It …