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Bob can play a number of instruments, none of them well. He likes his guitar, an Ovation with a sensual, curving back. The guitar is useful because he can play it anywhere,

  Now, this was not one of those cases in which a pig is killed in sacrifice and its private parts are gluttonously coveted as a divine relish, to be enjoyed only

1. The End I went home—after three hungry years, a dozen awful addresses, and too many leftover 60s prophets and 80s mental patients, and my father met me at the highway bus

Venerable Xoratio Rey is now very ill and there is no hope he will be able to live out his dream. That is why I am certain he will not resent me

Rush hour was over but traffic in the city was still bad. The long summer days kept the streets busy. Chuy did not like this drive and did not enjoy going to

It didn’t announce itself, the difference in the room, but it was there, of that he was positive. It wasn’t the soft caress of the new blanket, or the deep-sensed mattress he’d

Abbott, West Virginia, the town with a funny name, was a funny place to live. Needing somewhere to hang for the winter, I settled there and bought this cedar log cabin. The

Shards of sunlight flickered off the car’s bumper as it disappeared over a rise in the road. Josh stared at the bright bursts of light and breathed deeply, winded from his run

It was the penultimate day of the working week, after the English fashion. Dominguinho was glancing through the paper first thing in the morning, when he froze on the page of death

Karel Dibcek woke up and thought for a moment that he was still in Prague. He lay warm inside the duvet, his head covered and his eyes still closed, listening for the

Thirty-five years before he died, a man with straight and thick but graying hair hurried down the worn carpeting of a steep wooden staircase. Raul was just five years old, and this

Portents were in the air. First, to be given a shilling was remarkable. We were both handed a piece of the silver and sent into the outdoors, to appreciate the sun, amuse

I More excited than she’d ever been before, Ankbanatacha rushed into her parents’ bedroom — feeling indulged as only a loving, guileless ten-year-old only child could be — where she found her

  In this first summer night in the year of the itch, I watch the rain clouds collide and part in a dance as old as memory, and I stretch out my

“What kind of a name is Moses O’Reilly?” said Joe Babylon. I didn’t answer him because I was too scared to talk. I was only ten years old, off my parents’ property,

Cotton Barbeau thought of himself as both lucky and damn smart. He was called Cotton by everyone who knew him even though he had been given the Christian name of Edwin—Edwin Peale

I felt an irritation on my right shoulder and tapped my skin. Something awoke in me. A new sense of awareness overtook me, even as I struggled with the need for clear

Third day out, the oddest feeling overtook me. A hybrid of nostalgia and deja-vu, this fuzzy childhood sense-memory of melancholy bliss. I wanted to cry. Was it just the desert? Sand in

The note, if one word could be referred to as such, was on eggshell-blue stationery, and had come in a neat blank envelope, slipped under his door with sinister stealth while Henry

Christian Gimel was killed by a falling stand-up piano on the day The Dyke was painting the staircase in her apartment building. A chic couple was moving out of their apartment on

“Aren’t we quaint — sitting around this stage prop of a country store with a leaky pickle barrel as our centerpiece? Reminds me of our love life — preserved in the crusty

The day of, I find my husband in her room, kneeling in front of her bed. It is a moment suspended like a dream in the middle of the day. I wonder

September 1, 1970 ImageI have lived here for the past fifteen years eight of them alone save for Jason and Carruthers. They’ve endured as long as I have in this place, this

Each morning she stood on the bank casting her line into the water and reeling it in slowly as white smoke curled around her nose from a cigarette lodged between her lips.

Through habit, and for no other reason, they sat in a ring, each observer and observed. It was a way as good as any to see that nobody did anything. But if the

A child-slave’s blood washes the feet of the black prince in the mute heart of Africa. The prince will later use his blood-soaked feet to escape the lynching mob. One expects the

Here I was, forty-five years later, coming back to Saugus, looking to find something I had lost. Though I’d been told I was still considered somewhat quasi-handsome for my age, a place

Love in White Lucía blew out the eighteen candles of her white birthday cake in one go. She got the tip of her nose white with cream and her parents laughed merrily.

A Sentence in Transposition Cuban-American Style in Harlem a storefront restaurant pouring into a street a mélange of sweet, spicy, intensely fiery pepper, bitter scent pulls me into first, last Chinese-Cuba café,

The first time I saw him was in our shift room. We were coming in mornings—early mornings. The night shift had already changed and they were lying on benches or sagging against

“I want us to ride over to Aeria,” decided Mr. Bell early on the morning of the bank robbery. “We’ll take your truck.” “What for,” said Reverend Evans politely. It was a

Not long ago, when his parents were alive and his sister didn’t have to live in a trailer or dress up as an Arab, Oliver painted himself into a corner. This was

He’d wound up pretty well and delivered a hell of a punch. It hurt a lot and I banged my head hard on the ground when I went down. I was seeing