A wrinkled old woman sat at the table next to me. “Are you a writer?” she asked. “Yes, I am.” “Are you Jewish?” “No, I’m not,” I replied. “Where do you come from?” she asked in her broken English. “Chicago,” I said. “The Bohemian ghetto there, o

He looks in silence and he looks with longing.

She was a big woman, a massive, misshapen tree of a woman, wrapped in a rain-coat the size of a tent. She wore a cap on her head, its beak peeking out, drops of rain slipping of its edge like so many pieces of transparent candy.

Death came to my street, but I did not invite him.

"... you shake your head and look down as if I am a mongrel dog who has pissed the Tabriz..."

be accepted be accepted

Theresa stopped speaking to me because I ate cows. This made things simple. There was no conversation.

Cahill—Dr. Cahill to those who knew him in his small town in Maine—had decided that his screened porch should be relocated. Wouldn't it be better to winterize the current porch, adding a door at the far end which would lead to a new, smaller porch,…

I am everything she wanted me to be. I am crossed legs, chest out; I am wearing a soft white dress—lacy and completely inappropriate to the Midwest, to 2011, to anything about my existence.

When I was young, my mother told me that J. Edgar Hoover was a homosexual. I don't remember exactly when or why she shared this tidbit with me. This was, after all, fifty years ago. But Mom wasn't a homophobe, so I'm guessing that what intrigued her about Hoover's…

"It's what being out of work does to you, " she said, with that innocent sense of the everyday tragic, that kind murmur.

Sex when you’re pregnant Is like sex when you aren’t Pregnant, but with extra people.

He’d kept the parking space open. She used it most often, whenever she and her husband, an old drinking buddy, came to visit.

"Look," he said. "Look at the knife. See how I hold it?"

He lit a slim, brown cigarette and drew on it. "But have you heard the flugelhorn? I mean, have you heard a particularly adept flugelhorn?"