Kannika loved buffalos almost as much as she loved ice cream.
“Buffalos are stupid and stubborn,” her father said. “Only good for hard work and keeping the grass down.”
Kannika paid him no attention when he said things like that. She knew better.
He was a grumpy old man with a sour heart. She couldn’t even remember the last time she had seen him smile. She wondered what her mother saw in him. In Kannika’s eyes, her mother was the most beautiful woman in the district. Her beauty and grace were famous, her kindness unsurpassed.
When she wasn’t at school, Kannika was helping her father in the fields. If it were up to him, Kannika wouldn’t be allowed to go to school, but her mother insisted she needed an education.…
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“Wait for me,” Jimmy said to the taxi driver.
Jimmy eased himself from the taxi, careful to put his weight on his right leg. He swung his artificial left leg onto the sidewalk and limped up the walkway toward his parents’ front door. Despite all the therapy and gait training, at times of stress he could not walk without a limp.
His parents’ house looked the same: a square of yellow brick squatting behind a square of dandelion-infested grass. The picture window was still cracked. Duct tape still covered the crack.
Jimmy felt his heart palpitate. “Dear Lord,” he whispered. “Give me strength to tell them.”
Though he lived only a mile away from his parents, he’d rarely seen them since he’d graduated high school four years ago.…
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She received us with a fright, Lillibeth and me, her body half-hidden behind the door as she opened it. “I’m not ready for bed just yet,” she said twice. Mom had recently taken to fearing bedtime and would say this repeatedly before remembering me and that it’s not my mission to put her to bed. “It’s about time you’re here, Sassy,” she added, exhaling.
“Mom, have you had dinner yet?” She shuffled away from my question in her slippers and robe, plopping down in her armchair and taking up a magazine.
“I’m pooped, Sister” was her response as Lillibeth could be heard cranking open the can of split-pea soup in the kitchen. Looking over at Mom’s natural pine Christmas tree, I was surprised to see it was stripped bare of ornaments and lights.…
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1
Amid the usual smell of sour milk at the Stratford dump, a burning odor. The rusty flatbed rolls off the scale, turns for the graveyard of refrigerators. Robert holds up his hand to the next truck, extends his neck and sniffs. “You smell that?” he says. It has not rained in weeks.
The driver says, “Something burning?”
“Sure hope it isn’t here,” says Robert, stepping off the platform outside the trailer and rushing a few yards through the dirt to where he can survey more of the place. “I don’t see any smoke.” He radios to the crew: Erik over in metals, Mary up at freon, Juan in general, Steve in recycle, Donna in brush. “You guys smell that?”
Mary says, “Fire?”…
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He started by repairing the crack in the ceiling. It had appeared the month after he left, and I slept under it for the eleven months that followed. Now that he was home, though, the crack seemed to be growing, and I worried the ceiling was going to cave in on us in the middle of the night.
I helped him slide our bed from the center of the room, watched as he carried a bucket of spackle up a step ladder and began to smear it into the fissure. As he worked, the muscles in his face relaxed. He seemed to like doing it, even as I became bored watching. I left him to it and went to the kitchen for a soda.
Later, as I cut carrots for a chicken potpie, he came into the kitchen, wiping his speckled hands on a rag.…
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In those days, as the summer sun went down, our parents would gather on the half circle of benches in front of building 3 for an evening of gossip and laughter, chess and card games, and even though it was prohibited by the management office, maybe a cold beer or two. Thick curlicues of blue-gray cigarette smoke wafted under the conical sphere of a street lamp above the row of concrete checkerboard tables. Doo-wop oldies echoed from transistor radios. Kids played tag, or hide ‘n seek, or some other game that involved running and screaming, and occasionally crying because someone accidentally got hurt.
For a while, the best hide ‘n seek location was under the first bench, right behind Freddy’s father, Big Lou. Lou was a six foot six, two hundred and seventy-pound avalanche of a man with ham shank forearms and voice projection like a tuba. …
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Time is short, so here is the heart of it: everything I own in my house is alive. My reading lamp ate T-rex, my kitty. I came home from work today to the lamp hunched over the remains, the cat’s belly ruptured. The bulb lay on the ground beside, and when I closed the door, the lamp twisted its shade to regard me. Teeth filled the bulb socket and hung with gore. It hissed electric.
The guilt I feel for poor T-rex is tremendous. While I’d been increasingly aware for some time that things were not right with my possessions, I’d been sure poor T could hold his own. It is, after all, hard to imagine him being outrun by an object.
In his defense, I don’t think it was the lamp that brought him down.…
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