Excerpts
Minotaurs on Holiday
Florentina had grown up in Buenos Aires but had come here, to the world’s bottom, the southernmost city in the world, at the beckoning of a man who ran stables and owned a horse named Picasso. Don Julio took tourists and huasos for week-long treks on horseback and came back dead silent and in need …
The Girl with No Nightmares
Creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status. —Sir Ken Robinson So the girl they’ve been protecting, the one they’ve kept at the clean brick house on the hill surrounded by the scenic pine trees to the west, the pristine green fields with no power …
Orpheus in the Harbor
There’s nothing here that you’d absolutely have to have seen: I don’t like it here for the monuments: but because of the hours where you’re deeper in Venice than even on the Rialto: On the hostel’s hill, your ear sharpened to the tune of stars ringing over the harbor— even if too far off, so …
Losing Track
Sometimes there are people who forget or neglect us, who mysteriously you never see in a cafe even though you live in the same small city. This is not a problem until you stumble upon an obituary or short newspaper article and such a delicate suffering blooms that you are forced to accept never …
Digging a Well
By hand, with a blunted pickax, a plastic bucket, and a sledge— a spade’s no good in stony ground. Six feet, and still no water. Moses struck the rock and bliss gushed out, not blood from blisters, not curses from a cracked tongue. Each strike I make makes more rock. Tell my wife the kids …
Angle of Separation
The blue trees of winter stand at intervals with naked branches. Even when the sun touches them like the third circle in the archer’s target, their burnt cherry twigs hardly flinch. A train passes in the distance, carrying its cargo of smokers in black jackets. How seldom, the moments when anguish …
Anxious
My eleven-year-old niece calls me once a week, on average, to ask if she can come live with me if her parents and older brother are killed. We don’t live in a war zone, or even a big city; the nearest thing to us anyone would recognize on a map is Sioux Falls, and that’s …
The Boathouse
We turned back from the bay while light still hesitated. You said, “Can’t see how you lived here all this time, and never fished, or swam, or sailed,” but I found the poison-ivied path down to the old stone boathouse with its rotten roof. Watery light shimmered inside the arches boats once glided through. Among …
I Am Sitting at the Table
I am sitting at the table in my friend’s dining room her children age five and two are there also, the little one with her curly electric blonde hair that reminds me of my daughter’s hair before my sister decided it was too messy and had it cut short. When I came home from teaching …