ten

The library books are due so she waits for the bus in the rain. It’s a warm rain and she’s overdressed. She takes off her mittens and swings them by her sides until she notices a small child across the street watching through a window. She stops. She realizes that doesn’t [...]

ten

Often, she awakes to baseballs hitting the bark of an old tree. Its three in the morning and he’s standing outside next to a bucket, 90 feet away from the helpless trunk. There are empty beer cans on the dining room table. She throws them away so that her father won’t discover them in the [...]

nine

He didn’t say, ‘I love you,’ but he did call her every time he drove by the grocery store. “Do you want anything?” he would say. “I’m passing by Freddy’s. Do you want any…ice cream? Or…tampons?”
She thought of him standing in the checkout line with a box of tampons. At [...]

nine

Junior year with chapped lips stuck in some brass, out of breath and sweating away in leather and cotton dyed the school colors; he was losing his hair already. By the time he heard the first bomb drop two years later on a foreign island, it had all but receded. The trumpet got replaced by [...]

eight

He throws a handful of noodles into a pan of water and turns on the burner. The television is talking about children who seek out child molesters. Children who climb beneath rough hands uninvited. He cracks a beer. Scratches his arm. Unsuccessfully tries again to open the window. Thinks [...]

eight

Despite visits to the doctor and prescribed ointment, the wart on his left ring finger still remained, protruding like a dirty diamond of skin. Making a bank teller salary, Morgan couldn’t afford laser surgery but hoped that would change by winning this month’s competition in direct-deposit signups.
A middle-aged Russian lady with a mole on her [...]

seven

Tulips are in season but this means nothing to the industrial district where only dilapidated sneakers and unidentifiable pieces of plastic grow in rare patches of overgrown grass. He is most decidedly not thinking about tulips as he walks home to his apartment building with green trim painting the windows shut and a sign [...]

seven

She presented the paper and wire wings to father during a weekend lunch of open-face sandwiches and sliced peaches. Despite the wet spring and a slippery roof, he insisted on re-painting the house. Her 8 year-old mind concluded that the wings would help.
“This color couldn’t be found during the communist years.” he exclaimed.
The following morning [...]

six

She wants her own copies of the records that he puts on when they kiss. But she will never finish collecting them, and will forget the artists names by the time she is over the break-up. Years later, when her hips are widening and his underground music has become mainstream, she will be [...]

six

Seventeen year-old hands gripped the steering wheel on the 11 and 3 as he pulled away from her house in the undeveloped outskirts of the growing farm town just past midnight. A handshake agreement with his mother required him home before one.
It was a typical American two lane road decorated with large estates and horse [...]

five

On the cracked sidewalk children’s roller skates and thick sticks of colored chalk lay like abandoned war weapons. Frail brown bodies baptize themselves in lead-tainted hose water. The afternoon sun warms cheap plastic ponds and drowned beetles. Anna – age five, knock-kneed, blonde-haired – has apparently taken off her swimsuit some hours [...]

five

Busy with two jobs Ona rarely visited the flat by the Black Sea that she had inherited from a close friend who died a widow and with no children a year ago. However, enough overtime and a national holiday allowed a weekend to be spent there. Ona slept in the still furnished bedroom of [...]

four

Lenny is telling a customer about how he knocked up some girl in high school. He was also the first one to give her coke. She got addicted and miscarried the baby.
“My immediate reaction was ‘Thank God!’”
Rick’s mouth tastes like stale cigarettes. He is sweeping up yellow hair clippings. [...]

four

It was tradition for anyone who visited the New Mexico house to draw their father in a sketchbook that lay amongst marijuana ash and countless cup rings on the glass table of the living room. The girl sitting on the couch drew Dad with a garden hose and a giant smile. She screamed [...]