Mr. Henderson is going for a walk again. There’s a clear plastic tube coming out of his arm. A nurse was dispatched from the big desk in the middle of the hallway to make sure Mr. Henderson doesn’t fall over or abscond from the hospital in his quiet meandering way. She says [...]

[Read more →]

You are three days off the plane that took you from your old Russian home to your new American one. You came here to make a better life and there is no going back. For one thing, you have about two hundred dollars, total. Your jet lag has you sleeping days and [...]

[Read more →]

Nineteen, and the only deaf girl in her college class, she has, she thinks, finally found her place in the world. On Friday afternoons she grabs her bag, slips into a pair of flip flops, and walks twelve blocks to the campus movie theater. She walks up to the touch-screen ticket teller and keys [...]

[Read more →]

“My life is like the space shuttle exploding,” my friend Harriet says into the phone and takes a deep breath. “While it’s in mid-orbit, and a chunk falls off and lands in someone’s back yard and catches fire and the whole block burns down.”
Harriet and I have been friends since we were twelve. She [...]

[Read more →]

Behind linoleum-covered tables in the small kitchens of their small apartments, the Old Russians are sitting down to lunch. They are ladling borscht into floral bowls that they pull from their china cabinets. Their fingers are stained purple. The Old Russians are not age-old, but their minds are worn around the edges, [...]

[Read more →]

“Above ground, the miners’ families waited for word. Passing much of the week sequestered from the news media, they huddled together in an open-air warehouse on the mine’s sprawling property, eating pizza, whispering consolations to each other, and sometimes praying.”
The weather – tuned as it is to the irony of things – is beautiful. [...]

[Read more →]

On the regional train to Philadelphia I sat in the cafe car and tried to remember why I was there, while the tables around me filled up with middle aged men smelling of coffee and aftershave, and thirty-something women with perfect hair. They chatted about their weekends as they settled into the plush, faux-leather [...]

[Read more →]

The phone rang on a Tuesday morning, at 10:28 am. At first she didn’t recognize the sound, but when it went into its second repeat loop she dove her hand into the pocket of her overcoat and fished around for the tiny vibrating device. She thought how stupid it was that they kept [...]

[Read more →]

When I sit here late at night and look at the lit up windows of the building across the courtyard from mine, I sometimes try to imagine what they see when they look into my window, and I think it is something impossibly small.  Not that anybody looks.  I don’t think, anyway.  But if they [...]

[Read more →]

First person internal narrator. Mood is loss. Tone is revealing, chatty, unashamed. Working on: staying inside, being in someone’s skin, not focusing on external world. Worried about revealing character.
The trees left shadows on the snow and the light seemed to be coming from nowhere in particular, as if the sun were [...]

[Read more →]