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Life Choicesexpand_morePete gazes into his mother’s soul and finds a piece of smoldering coal.
She transfigured into a swallow in flight, or a hippo in the rainy season.
In your postpartum state, your best hope is to bluff your way through.
He left the Meijer in the dark of the April evening and drove to the Embassy.
When his father was out cold he tied him up, roping his arms to his sides.
The author reads her story, a finalist in the Winter 2013 Story Contest.
At first my dad was optimistic that he could be a one-armed farmer.
In three years he had made her forget that blindness meant not seeing.
With a couple, there must be one who outlives the other: the survivor.
He sees the slight swelling of her breasts in the open collar of her blouse.
Maybe she was a stereotype now: a single woman with a cat.
“You are a strange one,” she says. “Do you want to see my new tattoo?”
Apparently this was something he had to tell her with his clothes on.
The bank had stated that emphatically. They had to sell and sell now. It was as if Hank had aged twice as fast, and he couldn’t stand that truth.
Your bookself will appear to find you trivial, its nose deep in some tome.
Nobody knows where I am, Ned thought. No one in the whole world.
She says, It’s so difficult to find a good guy. My lips form a half smile.
Creating so many mail merges, loading ink, unjamming paper.
On her wedding day Ellen accidently locked herself inside the pantry.
This Lee was a woman, and she was a painter, and she was good.
I realize now that hers was the face that taught me what driving was.
The story doesn’t begin until the van breaks down, I always say.
“And if you ever tell anybody what I’m about to tell you, I’ll deny it.”
It’s so good to see you, she kept saying. You too, he said. She led him around the house to the places she’d stored his things. They had broken up five months earlier, while still long distance.
Jimmy’s jacket, mittens, and shirt were in a pile next to his frozen body.
Ed McClanahan
Manuscript pages from The Blue Flower and The Bookshop.
With my son in the NICU and my wife in tears, it felt good to disobey.
We pushed through the doors, back into the audition, among the lithe adults.
