Lamy, New Mexico, 1920
It was so early in the morning that the light could hardly be called light, and an unseasonable frost lay over the ground like a warning. Hector Olivares, esq, sat in his automobile, holding tightly to …
Fiction
Taffy of Turvyland
The whole thing—to do it and to bring her here, home where the back room is empty, clean, with burglar bars covering windows on banana plants in the alley, all that: Jon’s idea. We’ve laid in a supply of Depends …
The Scar
I have a friend who has always been thin. Both Sasha’s parents, well into their fifties, are lanky, and, for as long as I have known Sasha—into our earliest years of schooling—her parents have been this way, pale academics, who …
Bandana
My father wears dark bandanas. That’s his thing. The one time I saw his head without one, I was ten, passing by the cracked door of his room, and there his bare head was, like a floodlight, round and direct …
The Last Eunuch
In the afternoon three things happened to bother me. In order:
1) I read a Times article about the last eunuch of the Chinese emperors dying alone in a Beijing temple. Most eunuchs had saved their “three precious” in jars …
Spider Lilies
It happens in our sleep; we wake one otherwise normal morning to find the Garden District lawns overrun with towering green stalks and weird red blooms, delicate and menacing. When the owner of Holiday Heaven on Government Street committed suicide …
The Long View
So mom brings a guy home tonight—fourth fucking guy in a month—and guess what? He has a tattoo that says I Love Mom. It’s on his chest. They both think it’s hilarious. He finds it so hilarious he farts …
Late Shift
I steal home in the morning to find my younger brother on his knees. Pike’s fingers are jammed into something that looks like an engine. There’s newspaper covering the floor, and he wipes the grease off his hands before eyeballing …
Bigger
Technically, the condition was inoperable. The doctors had never seen anything like it and neither had the dressmakers.
The girls lived in the old farmhouse on the top of the hill with their sweet mother Linda. It’s not the kind …
The Cherry Wood Heart
The black-and-white photograph accompanying Quetsch’s obituary might just as likely have been taken years before or after I worked for him. I never knew him as anything but old and can’t imagine him otherwise. Yet the fact that he could …
