I
I was nervous: The overcast sky brought waves of showers, and I was unaccustomed to driving on city streets. Unsure I could find parking (though I had a map), I worried I would be late. But I arrived on time and began walking to my destination. As I waited at a stoplight, a car, rushing to beat it, splashed water on me. I panicked. Soaked from the waist down, I thought I’d have to go home and change, making me two hours late. I took a chance and marched on, deciding lateness was more embarrassing than wet pants. The pants dried within half an hour. But as I settled into the orientation for new students, the disquiet of being by myself emerged—no one to sit by and talk to, no one to affirm I’m not a cipher.…
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I got your letter the other day. Did you imagine my face when I realized it was your suicide note? The ungodly sound struggling between my lips? The dog running in circles, whining until I started breathing right again?
It’s been more than ten years since you left. I probably don’t have the right to go to pieces like that anymore. But if that were really true, you wouldn’t have written to me at all. Did you do it just to have the last word, like always? Well, I won’t let you this time.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to lecture you. I’ve wasted enough hours trying. I won’t bore you with how I felt when you vanished like a ghost.
The robbery was the second story on the evening news.…
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Catching the tall cylinders of wood on the
back of the chair, a skein of thin wool was
held in place so I could wind it into a ball
suitable for knitting a sweater, or socks,
hat, or mittens. Why didn’t any stores
have knitting-ready spheres rather than
coils of yarn? What if my chair’s back
didn’t have tall projections above the seat?
Round and round the fibers changed from
long strands to what resembled a child’s
plaything. Ready. I can begin. Begin.
This long-sentenced piece is what
pleases a literary editor who sees words
in run-on, and it’s designed to extend
as a skein. For me? I usually write
with a period placed
after a short line
as if I were
typing
dot.com.
– Lois Greene Stone
Note: This piece was originally published in June 2016 by The Lake and reprinted in the Nov/Dec 2021 issue of Scarlet Leaf Review.…
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She wasn’t afraid of the painting, at least not in the visceral heart-pounding way in which she feared the lurking darkness in her closet at night or the alien scuttle of centipedes. Rather, the discord between the painted hands and the rest of the figure haunted her, an unphysical conjunction that she felt rather than understood. Fear would have driven her away; she was not a brave girl. Instead, the unpleasant power the painting had over Helen drew her to it repeatedly. To her family, this was a relief, as they would not have understood her fear. Infatuation they could expect; the painting was the lens through which the family saw their history, the assembly of wood, paint, canvas, and varnish as much a family member as the person it depicted.…
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My grandfather died by suicide in 1966. Fifty-two years later, I met him for the first time.
Until then, I had pieced him together with bits of information collected here and there over time, discussed in hushed tones and select company. Until then, he’d been three things: angry, intoxicated, suicidal. After all, that’s what took his life.
After I finished my basement, my father brought over a box of my grandfather’s war memorabilia, in case I wanted to display some alongside my own items.
An embroidered shoulder patch read, “U.S. Air Force.” My grandfather was a mechanic, crawling into the belly of planes, making emergency repairs in a cramped darkness. He didn’t just know B-17’s and B-25’s. He flew in them – 103 combat missions.
There was an eyepiece he peered through to confirm bomber hits as a gunner in the Pacific during World War II.…
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Grammatically speaking, love is complex and must be handled carefully. As a verb, love can be used in both the active and passive voice, but I most often use it in the active voice, especially if a man’s name is the subject of the sentence, as in John loves me. In this sentence, John is doing the loving and “me” is the recipient of the love–a comforting notion when I’m feeling lonely. Love is also best used in the present tense because if I use the past tense, as in John (or Chris or Mike) loved me, this reminds me that the man in question no longer cares about me, leading to anger and disappointment. If I do speak of a man’s love for me in the past, I usually use the passive voice so that I can easily omit the agent, as in I was loved.…
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He started baling hay at 5:00 that morning, then he and his boys branded cows at 8:00, breakfast missed, again. He’d heft the heifers and throw them down, while a son hit the cow with the hot iron, The Bar Double B, the hair sizzling, smelling like what his Sunday school teacher must have meant by fires of hell, “mephitis” she called it, in her prim voice, all nose and lavender perfume.
After tending the herd, the latter part of the day was spent stringing barbed wire between the post oaks. No lunch, again. Only one torn thumbnail on his left hand; only one burn on his right palm. Not bad for a day’s work. But the sons were off to the city for “real work,” they said, in a bank or insurance job. …
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