Imagine you have a story to tell. It’s a story about hope, loss, tragedy, and courage. It’s your story. Now imagine trying to write this story having grown up in a country where education was denied to you, where telling your story has been criminalized. And then picture writing it in a second language. The…
“…And I should love you the more because I mangled you And because you were no longer beautiful To anyone but me.” – The Love Song of St. Sebastian T.S. Eliot Lining each path, each road stop and roadway we traverse here, wake-robins exhibit folds thick with lashes of redemption. Coarse flint beneath supports our beatific…
Seeing the curled photo of his mother and daughter in the small trash receptacle beside his daughter’s desk caused Tom’s stomach to seize. He bent over and retrieved the picture before sitting gently on Lisa’s bed, careful not to awaken her. The photo had been taken less than a year before his mother’s death. In it,…
1 The somewhat bizarre account set forth in the following few pages—about a man, as it happens, with no special virtues, yet who in the aftermath of an ischemic stroke became (and perhaps verifiably so) the happiest man on earth—cannot properly be called a fable because it is mostly true. Nevertheless, it will not be…
IA Moment in Eternity She jumped. She was here just a moment ago, looking beautiful and full of life. He squinted as he forced himself to look over the edge of the eighteen-storybuilding. She didn’t look beautiful anymore. Their relationship up until then had been a fairy tale. Talented Hollywoodscreenplay writers are paid very handsomely…
On Believing the Night Has an End When the Night Has No End The quarterback spits in his shoe and believes therefore he’ll win today. In this story I am the believing, though once I thought I was the shoe; I thought my father was the spit; I thought the quarterback was very bearded and…
The last day of my parents’ marriage, my mother’s lover elbowed my father in the mouth. This lover had been my dad’s best friend growing up, the boy next door. He followed my parents to Indiana when the steel mill in our Downriver Detroit neighborhood closed. They let him sleep in the basement of our small…
“Green. Your shoulder, Green.” “You worry too much, Blue.” “Don’t call me that.” “Sure, Blue. Whatever you say.” “You should get it looked at.” “Alright, calm down, I’ll get it looked at.” “Now?” “Nah. I got a date.” Blue scowled. Blue’s given name was Chris, but no one called him that. It was all Green’s…