fiction
-
The first thing she noticed was that animals stopped being afraid of her. It happened gradually. A blackbird remained on the cemetery wall when she passed beneath it. A fox stood at the edge of the woods one morning and watched her without running. Even the old neighborhood cat, a scarred thing that trusted nobody…
-
There are two of us living beneath my skin. He arrived first to every war. She stayed behind to rememberwhat we were fighting for. He is iron beneath the tongue,the locked jaw,the hand that does not shakeeven when the rest of the world is burning. He learned strength without boundaries. So he became very goodat…
-
He was the confessional without the collar. No stained glass. No wooden booth. No priest waiting patiently on the other side of a little brass screen. Just a telephone that was almost always on speaker and a man who could never keep his sins inside his own mouth. Behind closed doors, they poured out. The…
-
New Orleans is different before dawn. The drunks have mostly surrendered. The tourists are asleep beneath hotel sheets they will complain about at checkout. And the dead finally have the streets to themselves. I had one thing left to do before I left. The cemetery gates were still locked when I arrived, which felt appropriate.…
-
The woman in Jackson Square told me I had brought someone with me. I smiled. Of course I had. He had been with me for years. New Orleans was sweating through midnight, all perfume and rot beneath the balconies. Rain still glistened between the bricks. Somewhere down Chartres Street, a trumpet was playing something slow…
-
The room had fourteen cracks in the ceiling. There had been thirteen yesterday. He was almost certain of that. He lay perfectly still beneath the gray wool blanket and studied the newest one, a thin black vein beginning above the window and traveling toward the light fixture before disappearing beneath a blister of old paint.…
