Legs. Bare legs glinting in the torpid summer sun, pervading my senses and the sweet, egg-laden yeasty smell of plaited bread, challah, rising and heaving in my mother’s oven — those were my first impressions of women. The women drifted past my basement window, legs extended, their small forms and scanty shifts plashing past, their [...]
Yearly Archives: 2008
“The Hermit of Breakheart Woods” by Tom Sheehan
Over millions of years ago Breakheart Woods, between Saugus and Wakefield in Massachusetts, and a dozen miles from Boston, had been bookmarked by boulders and blow-offs and earthly cataclysm. To this day, somewhere in its innards from those first struggles of granite and earth fire, from violent fractures and upheavals to be known again only [...]
“In Huaraz” by Susie Meserve — Part 1 of 3
I. Ben and I had been in Lima a week when we decided to take an eight-hour bus ride to the mountain town of Huaraz. There, we would acclimatize for a few days while we planned a three-day trek in the Cordillera Blanca mountain range. Huaraz was known as the gateway to the Andes, and [...]
“Being the Millers” by Natasha Kochicheril Moni
Mr. and Mrs. Miller were not the sort to keep rum in their kitchen cabinets. They would rather keep it out, usually on the glass-topped buffet cart that wheeled its way so elegantly from their hallway down the corridor, to the entertaining lounge (or equally as well to their downstairs bedroom.) For the Millers believed [...]
“The Wallet” by Kellie Isbell
In the spring, Shane found himself unemployed and living at the mercy of a girl whose face he couldn’t recall. Candace had a cheap walk-up in Columbia Heights, two rooms with a microwave and a toilet and neighbors whose culinary cultures insisted they cook cabbage or beans or curry night and day, reminding him of [...]
“Restraining Order” by Marianne Villanueva
I always knew you thought I was crazy. I imagined the way you probably talked to your friends about me, telling everyone how I cut her pictures out of our photo albums when—how could I not?—she had nearly destroyed me, us, any possible future. And she was in so many pictures, huddled there with her [...]
“Half-Formed Angels Fall from the Sky” by Lynn Veach Sadler
My beautician May-Belle feels sorry for them. She says God’ll be in the middle of creating something new or performing some latter-day miracle, and something will come up that Saint Peter, Saint Michael, or even the Virgin Mary Herself can’t handle, and God will just have to go. Being God, He can’t kill or destroy [...]
“Still Autumn” by Literary Awards Finalist, Amy L. Jenkins
When I was a child my days were wild and unpredictable, and I sometimes miss the peaks of emotion present in that old life. Most of the time I abhor the drama of my past when my life centered on the loudness of my hard-drinking parents. But that day in the still young wilderness of [...]