The day, a compunctious Sunday after a week of blizzards, had been part jewel, part mud. In the midst of my usual afternoon stroll through the small hilly town attached to the girls' college where I taught French literature, I had stopped to watch a ...
I don't know," I said. "What else did you do for your first eighteen years?" "Like I said," he said as I unlocked the car, "I'm not so sure that you should go by my example." "Why not?" "Because I have my regrets," he said. "Also, I'm a guy. And guys...
The most important part of seeing Darla every night wasn’t the fooling around. It was the few minutes we talked while holding each other, the feeling of security I got with her, the feeling of being understood and loved. Before the eruption, I woul...
She said, "Daddy thinks that all the world's magic is almost evolved out." I thought of Roebuck Lake, its swamps and sloughs and loblollies and breaks of cypress and cane, its sunken treetops and stobs and bream beds and sleepy gar rolling over and o...
How did you get so scratched up then, Emlynn?” He looked at me uncertainly again. I felt wildly like laughing. Too many swooping highs and plummeting lows. What a weird few days. Weird being a massive understatement. “Cr-Crawling through gorse bu...
At the root of the tree at the heart of the world, With a chain round his neck, the Wolf lies curled. His gleaming teeth and jaws are furled, And the sun shall rise in the morning. His chain, it is forged of the nerve of a bear, Of the voice of a fis...
It’s said that sport is the civilised society’s substitute for war, and also that the games we play as children are designed to prepare us for the realities of adult life. Certainly it’s true that my brother thrived in the capitalist kindergart...
We’re soldiers, Emily. If we’re not elders or council members then that’s all we are. We’re here to serve those above us. We’re novel worthy, day walking, blood sucking, tortured souls trapped in a body that can’t die for all eternity wit...
Like all of my important memories, it has a potency that has influenced the pocket of time that holds it, so I can remember that particular Saturday afternoon, even though in many ways it was no different from any other. I can remember, for example, ...
Rosy lifted her arm, tried to say something, then pointed at the cafe, held her head, covered her mouth and—humiliation of humiliations—she began to cry. Right there in the street. “I’m so confused,” she said but it came out as a great honk...
Children, awkward, isolate, their bodies crammed to bursting with caffein and sugar and pop music and cologne and perfume and hairgel and pimple cream and growth hormone-treated hamburger meat and premature sex drives and costly, fleeting, violent su...
We hug, but there are no tears. For every awful thing that's been said and done, she is my sister. Parents die, daughters grow up and marry out, but sisters are for life. She is the only person left in the world who shares my memories of our childhoo...
He had in those days imagined himself capable of extraordinary heroisms and endurances which would make the girl he loved forget the awkward hands and the spotty chin of adolescence. Everything had seemed possible. One could laugh at daydreams, but s...
I really knew nothing about the dancing habits of the Scottish. But I wanted to help. "I could teach them Indian folk dances," I offered, scrounging my mind for school dances in gaudy garments. "Well, I'm not sure that they would be complex enough fo...
A friend’s 14-year-old niece was asked by her teacher what she wanted to be when she finished school. The teacher asked her to think hard about it and then get back to him with an answer. She didn’t know what to say to her teacher. A friend, on h...
Parents and schoolteachers counsel black children that, if they ever hope to escape this system and avoid prison time, they must be on their best behavior, raise their arms and spread their legs for the police without complaint, stay in failing schoo...
Are you finished?” He snarls. “I have perfect vision, sub. Now, I gave you a choice, something I rarely do. Either the skirt comes off so I can see your luscious ass; your corset comes off and I flog those delicious looking tits…or you use your...
Case shuffled into the nearest door and watched the other passengers as he rode. A pair of predatory-looking Christian Scientists were edging toward a trio of young office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their wrists, wet pink glitter...
The poor girl ws keeping that student's letter as a precious treasure, and had run to fetch it, her only treasure, because she did not want me to go away without knowing that she, too, was honestly and genuinely loved; that she, too, was addressed re...
Vanessa was deprived of her hormones in prison and thus retained several male characteristics that would have been less evident otherwise, most notably her voice. While she spoke in a high, little-girl voice most of the time, she could switch at will...
People say the beach is the great equaliser Who are they kidding? Sit at Bondi and watch the boys flex And the girls walk bolt upright It looks like a nightmare episode of Baywatch. The true equaliser is the mountain cold And stacks of cold flung tog...
