One night, Gordon Baker dreamed he was standing in his pajamas on the sloping roof of the Williams’ house and staring at the stars. He awoke to actually find himself sliding off the edge of the Williams’ roof. On his way over the edge, he grabbed the rain gutter, which separated from the house but […]
On Their Own Ground Read More »
She said she wouldn’t leave me and I believed her. She stared at me with those big, colorless eyes, half-smile, waiting. She was never the patient sort. “Do it,” she said. Every time she asked, the thought of the guard and the seven other inmates listening and responding made me hesitate, but only momentarily. “Would
“If you start taking what’s pure in a man, and you start putting it on a bill of sale, somehow you can’t help destroying it. In a way, all that business makes it so a man don’t have anything left to give.” — Sidney Bechet Shortly before I began teaching at El Paso Community College,
Glass jars of home-canned tomatoes fill the cupboard over my refrigerator, ’50s icons in a 21st century kitchen. If I could, I would pull one down, unscrew the gold metal band and pop off the lid underneath to release the fresh aroma of tomato. It would be a reminder of summer’s abundance, a buoy against
I peer out the sunroom window at the hydrangeas encroaching on the arborvitae, on the camelia — and just now in mid-November when the tight buds of the camelia are grasping at every bit of waning sun they can to bloom and the arborvitae is struggling to spread its branches; next month they’ll be the
I Have Been a Stranger to My Garden Read More »
José Arcadio Buendía spent the long months of the rainy season shut up in a small room that he had built in the rear of the house so that no one would disturb his experiments. Having completely abandoned his domestic obligations, he spent entire nights in the courtyard watching the course of the stars and
Gabriel García Márquez and the Solitude of Imagination Read More »