Slouched in the window seat, Deirdre dutifully reads a novel for her schoolwork. Her young face is remote, attending to more complex characters than mine.

“Tea?” I ask again.

She hesitates. “No. What are you making?”

I smack two eggs one-handedly against the bowl, a trick Mother insisted I inherit.

“Carrot cake. These carrots from last year’s garden are crying to be done away with.”

Deirdre’s slight smile indicates that I am simple, overly concerned with food and trivialities; she goes back to her reading, her education.

I shall wind up swallowing this cake myself. Deirdre is on a health...

Sure a shame,” the Christian boy said, his hand timidly patting her bad hip. He thrust out his own legs and looked down at them. They were whole and of even lengths.

He wrapped his arm politely around her. “Jesus healed the lame ones. I’ll bet he could heal you, too.”

Suddenly he sat straight up and grasped both her hands. “Lora Lee, Lora Lee, do you believe Jesus can heal you?”

“No,” Lolly answered plainly. “No, I don’t.”

The miracles of Jesus were wondrously inspiring, and he was puzzled by Lolly’s lame hip and faithless attitude. In his experience,...

My wife is no liberated bitch. Like me, she was raised in the old way, to be true to her nature. If I ask Merle, my mistress, why she cannot prepare a delicate gravy like Hedy’s, she says, “There’s no gravy in my character; I am not a gravy character.”

Today I am sick, quite ill and out of sorts. Hedy speaks to the doctor on the telephone, her voice hard and crisp as a cabbage rim. I worry her. When you are old, a sneeze can open the door on death itself. I have a pension; Hedy could take...

Jeanne-Marie, an abnormally fat child of sixteen who works as a laundress at Madame Lutte’s and has the afternoon off. Cook has given her a custard pie as a treat, and Jeanne-Marie has carried it all the way to the meadow outside of the village where a shallow stream runs through. She has taken off her black shoes, her black cotton stockings, and put her reddened, swollen feet into the water. Propping her elbows on her knees, she holds the pie and begins methodically to eat, her whole being occupied with the sensations in her mouth. A small splash lands...

The Reverend felt his housekeeper’s fingers tapping a senseless braille against his pajamas. Why did he allow her to awaken him like this? Her face, grooved and flat as a gas pedal, looked down at his. He grimaced up to signal he was awake and rolled over. Satisfied, Mrs. Gump limped to the window. Grasping the cord by its plastic bell, she jerked back the curtains.

The Reverend pitched over again and lay back, helpless as an invalid under her peevish ritual, waiting for her to go before he could turn back the bedspread and set his feet on the...

Twelve wives poke about the island cemetery, reading aloud the more tragic inscriptions.

Things must decay like mad in this heat and humidity! This from the young woman nearest Renee, the one closest in age to herself. Oooh, here’s a saddy, Susanna Wicklow, two small sons and a husband aged twenty-nine, “all bleffedly removed from earth’s mortal gloom,” May 1789. Those poor British must have sailed over and dropped like flies.

With a trained decorum reminiscent of the schoolgirls they had all once been, the wives file into the stone church.

No one can locate Renee until a search finds...

My wife met Ramon at the cold-frame nursery where she worked. It was late May, when some of the Pueblo farmers would come by to get extra green chili seedlings. Luana lifted and slid wooden flats into the blue truckbed while he angled around for his wallet. She was counting out change from the leather purse at her waist when he started telling her she was as pretty as the pink and white flowers blooming all behind her.

I get sporadic news from Luana, a few fuzzed snapshots of her kids. The letters come with me inside a squat adobe...

Overlarge, matte crow of death pegged to the underside, the staved-in ark of me. Blue-black reaper in conjured shape of a gloomy bird. Mute, it has performed nothing. Up to now. Why shouldn’t any of us, if chance favors, turn our backs on its blunt, vigilant spectacle?

The coarse girth of the crow swells in Mrs. Grant, flooding the interior of the car so that when the navy-blue station wagon turns onto the gravel road marked Watervale Inn, pressed against the car windows are weighty spatulate feathers, an incurious eyesphere, turning this way, then that.

It is noon.

“The Grants...

A household fly lands upon threadlike legs which end in splayed, cabriole feet. No head to speak of, its oxblood eyes split by a puny spray of antennae. Even in patterns of flight, the fly remains graceless, a creature of annoyance.

I take sharp pleasure in slamming him into the desk top, in sweeping the dead pulp onto an envelope and removing it to the garbage. I should remember to ask Penelope’s husband, when he returns here, if he finds any charm in burying the dead, in tamping down their final bit of property with one of his several shovels....

Elsa Wagner navigated, leaving her feverish wake among the brightly preserved, gamy corpses of Rome, while her mother, a cloth laid over her eyes and ankles elevated, napped. She took a complicated series of buses to San Pietro in Vincoli to view Moses and the chains which had bound St. Peter. Elsa went in and out of dank, aphotic churches as quickly as if they were shops which did not carry the brand she insisted on.

Ingrid Toller was not unaware that her forty-two-year-old daughter, still handsome, and brainy in that unsensible way of aesthetes, was afflicted by a recurrent...

I suspected him the minute he parked his suitcase on our front porch, hearing him ask Mercy, who stood behind the screen door, if this was the Three Sisters Shelter for the Aged and Retired. From where I sat, in deep shade, in my wheelchair, I could see that the handkerchief he wiped over his face was soiled and that the socks he wore did not match, one being tan, the other black. But Mercy couldn’t see that. She pushed open the door and let him step inside our farmhouse. In my opinion, that was the most ignorant thing she...

Heat dulls the village. Pigs and dogs alike, tongues flagged, hides rimed with dust, burrow under the pilings of thatched houses. Grief too dulls the village, damping voices to the torpid revolve of the long-bodied wasp in its season. Winter. Invierno.

Families line up, dressed in church clothes, before the drowned boy’s house. The older sisters come down the steps to pass wooden bowls of cigarettes and betel leaf, betel nut. Mourners go inside, walk around the cleanly clothed body (white shirt, dark trousers, hair so deftly arranged you can see ridge marks the wetted comb has made). They are...

I would open up the shop, fill the bathroom sink, and write my name across its flat water. Helen. Helen means light, actually.

Or I would take up the round silver mirror from the vanity set, carry my face around the unlit adobe rooms, let beveled angles of light skid across that too-plain face, one eye a yowl of ferocity, the other pretending, quite convincingly, to be anguished.

I moved about this unfrequented antique shop five days a week. A displaced person, valueless to collectors, I had tucked up in a jumble of European antiquities, none of which was dusty...

Waiting at the gate of the Costa Rican airport, a frayed palm much like a circus plume splashing upwards from behind his head, Mr. Sykes inadvertently appeared tropical. Pressing around him were shorter, darker-skinned people; her father looked like an endangered white heron rising above a muted carpet of sparrows. Beth pressed Sierra’s face to the window of the airplane.

“There’s Grandpa, honey, right over there. See the man in the red shorts and blue-checked shirt? Yes he is, he’s very tall.”

Secured like a flag to its pole, above the heads of the Costa Ricans, his white hair a...

Since there are no phone booths in a ghost town, I wrote a postcard. The postcard was white, which bothered me, so I colored it. On top of the red smear, with a black crayon, I printed:

Dear rattlesnake killer,

Please come right away.

Luisa

p.s. we have money this time

It was two weeks or more before he came and he wasn’t even the same man as before. Maybe he was his son, that’s what I thought at the time. But before you hear about that, I want to tell you about Luisa.

Luisa’s hair pushes out from the...

My parents must have driven me those four hours north. I don’t recall. But at that girls’ camp in the California Sierras I was eleven and outgoing enough to write, direct, and star in an outdoor theater show. Afterward, I sported the black bowler I’d worn in my performance. A happy eccentricity. By the end, there were so many promises, embraces. I took home everyone’s address, made everyone go home with mine.

The second year was more than a failed attempt to repeat success, more than the shadowy onset of puberty. These counted, of course, but I think it was...

Purplish soil receded in motionless, combed waves from around the frame house. The ripening corn surged, had an oily river sheen over it …

Holding her newest baby, Lurancy walked again to the road’s edge, shielding her eyes, her sunbonnet tied but swinging against her damp back. Deep clay ruts crisscrossed the road, old wheel ruts, but no dust was building in the distance, no buggy approached from town. Mr. Asa B. Roff, a wealthy lawyer, and his wife Anne, former residents of Watseka, had come from Emporia, Kansas, to visit their eldest daughter. News that they would also be...