Stories

I have a bigger tally-whacker than a Pulitzer Prize wining author.  I should know: I have his pajamas.  I didn’t steal them. I found them, last Summer at the New Orleans Radisson. In the bureau, I find these pajamas, cotton with blue fish.  Next morning, the maid thinks they’re the previous guest’s, some poet who’d just won the Pulitzer. I

She believes she believes in dreams.  She knows they’re real, but she knows they can’t come true.  Her dead husband, Mr. Cass, taught her that dreams were best forgotten, traded in for a cast iron skillet or a pound of bacon.  Now, just a month after he died, Mr. Cass seemed like maybe he was a dream, one that had

High above Mars in a small space station, two men met in the boardroom of Offworld Mining Corporation.  The older of the two, Stringfellow, sat in a treadchair, too weak from cancer to stand.  The younger man was a job candidate–handsome, twenty-three, fresh from Earth, and terrified. The room was dark, with only an egg-shaped viewing window to shine light

The boy played in the dirt yard. His mottled back was bare as the wind blasted fields around the house. He sifted the loose dirt like flour through his fingers until it drifted and faded into the breeze. He chewed his thumbnail, ground tiny rocks between his teeth, and spat out the remains, skin and rock together. The boy’s mother

“Boy? Boy?” my cousin Floyd Lee screamed. “Boys play with toys. I’m Sammy. I play with your mammy.” My little brother Coby swung with all his weight, which was considerable. Floyd Lee’s mouth clomped shut, and he fluttered backwards, landed on his butt. Coby didn’t say nothing, only jumped at Floyd Lee, but Floyd clawed himself up and took off.

Thirty miles from the white sandy beaches of the Gulf of Mexico, the Florida panhandle became a dense forest of straggly pines. The two-lane highway that Coby had taken south from Dothan slithered through the rough underbrush, far away from the hotels and tourist traps on the coast. An occasional car flickered in the darkness then passed Coby’s truck, a

Do you remember the first time you caught a catfish? How about the first time a catfish caught you? I do. I have a inch-long scar underneath my thumbnail to remind me of how I once wrestled with both a mud cat and my faith in my daddy. I had just turned twelve, and Daddy packed the fishing rods, my

Calla heard the train before she saw its light cut through the fog.  The air horn blasted as the engine wound over the ribbon of track, at first unhurried and small then growing until it blew by the small people in the Nashville station. Calla clutched her baby and the steamer trunk that held the contents of her life. “It’s

My dad, Allison thought as she took the Corvette off of cruise control, is a philosopher. Not a Descartes or a Machiavelli. More like a Will Rodgers, a man who studies every day life and finds meaning in it. If she’d had a penny stock for all the times her dad had said, You get what you pay for and

I have long legs and big feet, and I wear cowboy boots. So when my flight left LaGuardia, Delta terminal, at 6:45 am, I was in first class because I had to have some place to put my legs. The narrow coach seats aren’t a problem—I’m sort of bony, but my legs, just like the pioneers, need room to spread out.