“Nature’s Dare”
“I saw these images and thought these thoughts. Nature harrowed me with her beauty. She attacked me and dared me to master her. As the sun, she flaunted her flames, born of a billion filaments of micro-light, a fusion of hydrogen to helium, an extrusion of the vivifying heat, the dazzle, the brilliance of all […]
Continue reading“Childhood Halloween”
“The images of this primitive pagan holiday got stamped firmly on his mind and remained there throughout his life: thought-photographs of his mother applying make-up pencils and creams to his face, memories of being fitted for costume pants that required safety pins to hold them up and of straining anticipation of the hour when the […]
Continue reading“The Sales Manager”
“Bill Michaelson, known as “Dollar Bill,” had taken a wrong turn in the career line, missed the queue for stand-up comedians, where he would have been a star, and instead ended up managing a perplexity of peddlers running about the office like a set of over-wound toys, acting as if they knew what they were […]
Continue reading“A Babe in New York City”
“In this urban maelstrom called New York, Skylar felt naked, like a defenseless babe among wolves, but simultaneously elated. Vulpine shopkeepers, framed by garish SALE! signs hustling cheap cameras, radios, and jewelry, leered out of their squeezed storefronts; muscled loungers in t-shirts and jeans with cigarettes in their mouths and spares behind their ears leaned […]
Continue reading“Utah’s Magnificence”
“But the finest visual treats were those furthest removed from the travelers’ point of vantage. In the distance, shimmering in that soft, other-worldly light which dusk sometimes brings, gleaming in palest silver and chastened white, loomed a vast temple structure part celestial and part chthonic: a building of rock reminiscent of Karnak, Angkor Wat, or […]
Continue reading“‘Our House’ Redux”
“As though perfectly cued by an all-wise disc jockey, the child-pure simplicity of “Our House” seeped into the air. The song could have been the tune invented by a five-year-old during his first explorations of the tangled grounds (with the warped and wizened cedar tree, wild blackberry vines, and sun-freckled glade) of his great-grandmother’s farm: […]
Continue reading“The End of Exams”
“The conclusion of final exams and the end of a school year bring into the vacuum they create a celebratory fervor akin to that felt by soldiers going off to war. One might expect quite the opposite: for the students have completed their onerous work and the warriors are only preparing to begin theirs. But […]
Continue reading“Softening the Edges”
“In Skylar, as in Yak, the smoke produced an astonishingly pleasant, formerly unknown condition of repose. His plank bed grew downy; straight edges arced and wobbled; black and white began to vibrate with colors of spectral variety. Time, which had always marched in soldierly cadence, clip-clopping and tick-tocking its way forward in sheer linearity, threw […]
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