Her brothers passed me at the dinner table like salt. Her sisters took me out of each other’s arms with fingers spread to protect my neck. Aunt Margie and Grammie Lorraine prayed three rosaries for me, on the black rosary from Ireland that hung beside the telephone in the hall. The same rosary that was draped on my uncle’s hands when he laid dead in…
Blue-Black Number 4
An excerpt… The summer after I graduated from high school, my father started wearing jewelry. First a platinum watch. Then a small bracelet, a thinly threaded band of yellow gold. Then some chains to match. He wore two, maybe three of these at a time, nestled in the gray, white-crested waves of his chest hair, his shirt unbuttoned lower than usual to show them off….
Lightning Strikes Twice
The book began as a project to downsize the story of Job. Then Russell got the idea to do the same for all the remaining books of The Bible. He spent two years researching and rereading The Bible, cover to cover for what would become God is Disappointed in You.
Mothwick in the Fog
This photograph appears in our Fall 2013 issue (Vol. 60.1).
Fire
Eric’s stomach is smooth and flat and there’s a trail of hair there like on a normal person, but his thighs down to the tips of his toes are still ruddy and hairless, all the skin taut. His calves and feet have an almost molten complexion and they shine under the water like they’re waxed. He worries his body will always be this way, that…