I. The girl within the sleeping woman dreams her dream of ending. To her comes the cowgirl with no kids: she's riding high atop her turquoise horse, steady by its braided mane. Silver pistols holstered. The girl in the woman in the dream she's dreaming…

It was Brad, for short; or so he would say. But really his name was Bradford, and he was a writer. He had almost always lived in New York. He was only half-white. His mother had run away with a black man in the sixties. Her father had told her to never come back to…

I can’t stop looking at the burly man to my left with the blue lips and three-inch mustache. He orders his fourth whiskey. He laughs at my melancholy like it was a flat thing--a dead animal to strip of its fur. Why be melancholic when you can float on whi

I thought each day died inside the clock.

I usually idle by Spades Check Cashing on 8th Ave. and catch folks that way. The Homestead cops, they moved stations from a little up Amity to down on 7th, which is closer to Spades, but they leave me alone. I've drove jitneys almost ten years. Only been cited twice,…

"How could anyone say that I was wrong, that I was crazy?" These thoughts scraped across her mind and tore open the reasons she had knitted herself into over the years.

Cinnamon and smoke infuse the days that shorten, chill, accelerate.

Wives, without exception, have birthdays, which if forgotten, are much-less-than-mirth days.

nothing can stop a group of genteel Southern women from a card game, and divine intervention makes one's participation in such an event quite worthwhile

45s I’ve kept wrapped in newspaper in the attic. These are all mine. Some doubling up in sleeves. Some pushing tears in the seams.

It will only be minutes before I can slip out of this shelter, but time has suspended itself like a web over the sky. I look up and see a break in the clouds moving north from the furthest tip of Lake Erie. Rain turns to drizzle, other guests arrive toget

The young girl has given up, and lies sprawled out upon the yellow cover on the bed, with her blue sarong wrapped loosely around her body. One arm lay back up above her head, where it was thrown during the exertion of birth. Her yellow halo surr

I was Orson Welles skulking in the shadows and you Alida Valli; our time measured like footsteps advancing on Gethsemane.

Men aren't good at these kinds of things, my mother tells me. She states it as if it is a scientific fact.

Overnight, I felt drunk, as if headed for hangover, but I hadn't drunk enough to cause it. What caused it? Superstitions dialed in sleep.