“What are you doing here?” Betania was standing on a corner, two blocks from home. Nervous. She wore an old dress and had her hair loosely tied up in a bun. If it weren’t for the carelessness of her appearance, she might have been taken for a novice prostitute. “What are you . . .
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Maggie fans her hand out on the windowpane. She brings her mouth close to the glass and huffs hot breath, leaving behind the web of her handprint ringed by fog. “Mom,” she says peering through the stencil, “I think there’s someone outside.” Maggie’s mother, Magalys, shoves her feet into slippers, grabs her . . .
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When does a cemetery become a field again? I stood before the shared gravestone of my great-great-grandparents and knew about them only what I’d learned that day. He was a minister and farmer, she a midwife who delivered babies around the turn of the last century for five dollars per live birth. . . .
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In a burst of concentration, I succeeded in catching the hen and stood withit in my hands. Strangely, it didn’t really feel alive:stiff, dry, an old whitefeather-riddled woman’s hat that shrieked out truths from 1912. Thunderhung in the air. A scent rose up from the fence boards, like when you opena photo . . .
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Mrs. Ebelmayer had not seen the world. She had spent her childhood and youth in a pleasant, roomy house in the suburbs of a large city and , once married, had outgrown the early stages of her life in a house very similar to her first, in another suburb of the same . . .
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My grandfather Franjo Rejc lived his life in Bosnia. As a high-ranking railroad official, he moved from station to station until, several months before the outbreak of World War II, he arrived in Sarajevo to work at the main headquarters with the title of chief railway inspector. When I first wrote about . . .
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All day the sun moved over the rock I sat on.All day I tried to think like an elk.I’d been drinking bad winefrom a thermos and counting the bladeson little bluestem. It was nearly darkwhen they finally appeared under the gnarled oak,brown legs in prairie grass. And there’s the bull——from “Ghost Child,” . . .
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We stayed together like two voicestrying to find each other in the dark.She had an uncle like a father to herexcept when like a king he made herbow her head, and if he held itto his groin it was in a secret lifeshe kept from no one save herself. . . .—from . . .
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The pass through the mountains led into a narrow, serpentine ravine with dense forests of birch and poplar on both sides. A caravan of nine camels loaded with bridal dowry and accompanied by a couple dozen men and women on horseback slowly made its way along the rocky trail, now ascending steadily, . . .
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By the age of eight, I had heard all the horror stories about my father. I had heard the one about him literally putting his fist through a cop’s face. I had heard the one about him sending a badass Irish gangster into convulsions with a single jab. And who hadn’t heard . . .
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