Blackout

Blackout

At sundown, we would go for walks along the road that went from the airmen’s quarters toward Central School. It was a quiet road back then, when we lived there for a brief while in 1971. The streetlights beside the road would have just been lit, a chill in the air as...
Hidden Rooms

Hidden Rooms

All things which areoutside lovecome to me now—This view and the old woman’s understandingof it, asking to liveone more year, one more yearone more generation, two generations, three,one more eternity. —Leah Goldberg, “In Jerusalem’s Hills”   Erna’s sunglasses...
Theft of Fire

Theft of Fire

Bobby Ulili, Digital Sketch, 11.7” x 16.5” Through the window of the inn, Mathew could see the shadow of Rheinsberg Palace over the lake and a purple ribbon of sky dusted with stars. He drank a weissbier from a tall glass and ate blood sausage with sauerkraut. The...
Dorf and the Daisies

Dorf and the Daisies

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.—Samuel Beckett, Murphy It’s obscene the way she cleaned up. It was a mess. I was a mess. Covered, I was. And she came and, I swear to God, when she finished, there was nothing left. All traces were gone. I kept...
Allen and Allen

Allen and Allen

A little over two years after he’d enlisted, Allen was back from Iraq and back with Lawn Island Landscaping. If I’d been scared of Allen before, I was terrified of him now. It wasn’t what Allen did that was frightening; it was more what he didn’t do. The first week he...
War Stories

War Stories

I once taught a course called Literature of War at a small community college shortly before the first Iraq war. One assignment I gave was to interview someone who had been in a war about their experiences. For most of my students that would have been a father or...