When the new shopkeeper arrived in the village he aroused great curiosity along with some scorn. He was deemed refined because his fingernails looked as if they had been varnished a tinted ivory. He had a horse, or as my father was quick to point out, a glorified pony, which he had brought from the Midlands, where he had previously worked.
I know a woman who takes mouse baths. It is true that they are white mice, that she is a singer, and that she only does so before going off to sing Thaïs. While servitors are hastening supper for the
It was the day of the boat races, and Stanley Marvel and his friend Rolly were there, sitting on a grassy bank overlooking the river. The river was brown. On it sped the thin bright shells of the rowing teams.
Stiff as a ramrod, a straight arrow, six foot three, his face a starched white, Isaac Zavelson stands in the elevator beside some of the other employees of Jews for Israel, waiting for it to move. Entering
My great-aunt Eva had patience as if she could wait for eternity; that was why, when she died, mean and ugly and absorbed by her pain, and we buried her in the family plot in an August heat wave, everyone
Mordecai Maccabee was in Disney World recording sound and Geraldine La Cru was in her apartment drinking tea. She sat at a table and kept her eyes on the river. A red tug-boat with a black chimney
“IT DON’T MEAN A THING IF IT AIN’T GOT THAT SWING” Mary Kingsley: My parents died and suddenly I was left with nothing to do. I went back to the piano, but Mozart would no longer calm me,
Juanita Creehan was a waitress in a piano bar near Camp Pendleton, California. She had been a widow for twelve years, and her most intense memory of her marriage was an imagined one: Patrick’s death in
“The center, the center.” “Zontle?” “The middle of town. Put it that way.” “Ah, meetzle! ” he recognized, somewhat chuffed, and then sighted his nose down the street in the direction of the Rynek
The treacherous nature of human language is shown with admonitory force in an incident well known, if not fully understood, among the people of this part of the hemisphere in which I spend my days. In the capitol of one of those countries bordering on mine, during the rule of the present dictator’s infamous uncle, there was erected a spacious and elegant clinic, all of white marble, modelled chiefly after the Alhambra, but with disquieting influences of Versailles and Stonehenge.
We are at war and I am on a train leaving for the country.
I am troubled because I suspect it might be better to spend the war in the city.
Out the window I see soldiers cooking lunch in kitchen sinks and other unlikely containers.