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Posts from the “Short Story” Category
My mother comes to stay with us once a week because for the last eight months she’s been having an affair with Eddie Royce, our city councilman. Wednesdays she drives to Mandeville from Lumberton in time to have an early dinner with my husband Howard and me. Howard’s reserved, or tries to be, because he’s fond of my father and not comfortable harboring my mother under these circumstances. She’s all charm with him, flirty and interested in what he’s doing, and when she’s like this she’s hard to resist. She’s lost ten pounds, and tonight at dinner she asks Howard if he notices, and when he says, yes, she explains that’s why she’s picking at her food, not because it isn’t delicious. “There is…
Categories: Fiction, Short Story
Tell your boss you enjoy what he has you doing, about how you wake up in the middle of the night with ideas. You’d like more to do; you have time. He’ll laugh when you joke that you’re developing a loyalty habit that’s like a twitch. Stop before you admit you don’t want to go home. Remember the details he’ll soon forget he mentioned. So when you say something he’s forgotten he told you, he’ll tap his forehead with a pen, and say, “Here you are again, Carly, inside my head.” Be subtle, just a bit inappropriate. This requires balance. The world’s full of blatant need and honesty. All those handshakes that run a beat too long, footsie under the table. Avoid skin. Think…
At our lunch this week, I talk to my father about teaching to keep him at arm’s length. He’s a music professor. I’m in graduate school. The college is across the street from IHOP. I say I’m worried my knowledge is a mile wide and an inch thick. How will I answer their questions. He’s staying on track, paternal, encouraging, says I won’t begin learning until I get in front of a class. Daniel left ten days ago. When I told my father at last week’s lunch, his hug goodbye in the parking lot was too long. “Welcome back,” he’d said. He’s so easy to encourage. When I was young, I would break up with boyfriends, sometimes, just for him. It was my gift.…
Lydia tapes her husband’s TV weather forecast so she can watch what’s going on between him and the station’s new anchor, Stephanie Russell from Iowa City. Her face is small and flawless. Perfect nose and lipstick, and crystal blue eyes that push back at the camera. Maybe nothing’s happening there, but Lydia wants another look when the broadcast isn’t live. And if she’s not wrong, she wants the videotape. Lydia hits the record button and watches this handsome thing move around. The meteorologist who must have a perfect wife, some tall children, an Irish Setter who runs full out on the levee. Keep reading. —————————— (From Mississippi Review, then, and the Blip Magazine archive now.)
Categories: Fiction, Short Story
“Mike is stretched out now on top of his clean desk, resting, the mug balanced on his chest, and I put the phone back in the cradle and lean over to kiss the curve in his chin. He is my CPA. We’ve been having an affair for ten months, and we meet when we can, here, or some days we just get in the car, drive across the river to Plaquemines Parish, and follow the levee until it runs into the Gulf. I’m a location scout, and last week I took him to check out Grand Coteau, featured him in some Polaroids I’ve got taped to my refrigerator door. I’m thirty-five, and he is younger by a few years, my height, slight.” A short…
Categories: Fiction, Short Story
“Larry’s eyes are closed. I kiss him, small kisses around the sides of his mouth. He likes that. I want my kisses to feel different from the ones he gets from women his age. Those would be targeted, and in a hurry for marriage, babies. I have so much time, this year and ten years after that.” From the short story, “Famous Fathers.”
Categories: Fiction, Short Story
A man’s been in jail for six weeks awaiting trial. Lillian doesn’t say his name. A man kidnapped her from the grocery store parking lot. He raped her at his house, and again in the desert, chopped her hand off with an ax, and left her for dead in the brush, thinking she would bleed out, but high school senior Doss Williams, student body president, stopped his car and saved her life. He helped her into the front seat of his Blazer, found her hand in the scrub, and wrapped it in his windbreaker, then raced Lillian to the emergency room. It was warm that day. While she waited for help on the side of the road, the wind blew sand in her face.…
Categories: Short Story
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