On my second trip home from the University of Illinois down state in Urbana, it was during our break between semesters, I remember it was a particularly freezing cold and miserable January (1963.) I had a date with Lynda.

She looked out the window. It was raining. “Better than snow” she told herself. She didn’t mind traveling. It was good to travel once in a while. By road, when someone else was driving. Like now, on the bus back home. It gave you time to reflect, re

She could estimate herself around 30, though this was debatable since she had stopped counting years ago. She looked like a person who would be very pretty if she wore make-up, but she didn’t and therefore wasn’t.

There are these unspoken zones,where everybody is corrupt,and everybody is a con artist.Half the people are frauds,and the other half are phonies.Each person trying to outwit the next person,while everybody else tries to pick each others' pocket.Simultaneously and…

All of the students’ eyes were fixed on him, and now Nelson was embarrassed. It’s not that he didn’t want to pay attention. He already knew the answer to this book. But he wouldn’t dare tell the rest of the class or Mrs. Edwards.

The monsters in the sky burst with riotous laughter, their rumbling voices barking out commands, their cracked nails scratching on the screen, their knotted knuckles tap-taping on the window. Little girl, won't you come out to play? She clutches her floral bed sheets,…

Nothing came of the dust.

There by the opposite doorway opening onto the thinly carpeted kitchen lay—well, what seemed to be all that was left of Miriam Flagellporte . . .

III. The entire place was dusty and rocky, much different from my home. Pockets of power, heat, had proven to be dangerous and inhospitable, sometimes even volatile. It was not the first sign that I…

Two Roman busts have come down to us, both copies of supposed earlier Greek originals, from the 4th. century BC.

“I was thinking about the other night.” He said from the living room.      She could hear his work boots scrape and creak across the old wood floors, and the sound of his weight landing on the couch, then the snap of the lighter as he lit the pipe and…

Sometimes your Monday morning answer to the inevitable questions don't have to be so mundane and repetitive. And sometimes they do. No one gives a shit anyway.

Cathy told the boy to sit in the seat behind her, and gave him her scarf for his face. He nodded and plucked the scarf gingerly from her hands, suspending it between the clean thumb and ring finger on his left hand.

so much of what we know with certainty is amazingly uncertain

I hope my blonde down still beats in your heart, and the black crescent curved under, you will remember, and I would move toward your window where my own heart lay in a dish, with the thick valley lifting. Remember, I crossed and uncrossed my legs f