THE ARCHIVE
ALICE’S TRIP
Alice slapped her hand across her lips and held it tight to her mouth, the cup of her finger digging deep into the flesh of her cheek. All life in the restaurant collectively died, the moment those two words left her…
NORAH’S BARQUE
Our farm was on an island where my husband and I had chosen to live. Our children had been born here, and had grown into adults here. When I tell my story to the new ones as they come along, as I so often do, the first question always is…
THULE
I recently received an email from a Norwegian scientist, a longtime, if distant, colleague and mentor. The letter disclosed that he was near the end of his life, and it was with great urgency…
the rage of a wildfire
See, I grow immensely! I am eating the hill. I leap off the cliff. I plunge into the canyon. I stand on the ridge. Brother wind is at my back. I swallow whole, the mountains and pastures. I am a magnificent presence, feeding on everything I touch and stir. They are above me now, in the skies with hapless buckets of water tinkling down…
hark, hark, the dogs do bark
The main road leading into town is not paved. It is drained and ditched for winter snow and it has gravel on its surface, but it is rough and rutted, too rough to be inviting, as the residents of this town had intended. There is no directional sign and no road name. The little road comes off US 30 in the heart of Nebraska at a nondescript junction with only a row of mailboxes in evidence. Washboard rattles its course and stones scar its surface. A random traveler coming upon…
a bedtime story
A messy young man’s bedroom, last night’s pants are half off the chair, underpants splayed beneath the bed, abandoned beer bottles inhabit a corner, piles of discards and dirty clothes are scattered about. The young man lies face down on his crunched pillow, his mother has placed herself at the foot of the bed to get him up for his day’s work. He sleeps on.
the fall
Now as dusk arrives, the storm has come upon the shore and an old wooden house anchored to the ground at the top of a cliff high above the roiling sea. The old house trembles as the wind leans heavily into it with a pelt of rain. Airborne water finds its way between the laps of the weatherboards ana into pockets and fractures within the walls. Despite the malevolent rage outside the old house, it was bedtime inside…
the diorama
In the first diorama, there was a kind of primitive man and woman behind the glass. They had no clothes on. They look like skinny people with big, rubber masks with primitive faces pulled over their heads, long knotted hair, big brows over their eyes and no foreheads. They had just killed an animal and were getting ready to…
(NEW) others of their kind
When the Great Pestilence ravaged Europe and North America, I was a girl of just twelve years. My home was in the South of France. My family lived in a small village. A year after the deadly virus began its march, my mother and father and a carefully chosen gathering of ninety-three, still healthy villagers, which included many of my friends and their families, decided we must flee if we were to have any chance of survival.
of words and nails
A strange and powerful force had overtaken him and laid his body and mind asunder. As I drew near the cadaverous building, I saw but one light hanging in a vestibule on the second level. I crossed a leaf strewn drive and reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled luster by the forbidding structure. Its curious entry door stood before me now…
(new) julie and the night cruiser
Down the rows of corn, over the black highway, she sensed it before she heard it, she heard it before she saw it. Over the night sounds, the cricket and peepers and the shifting corn stalks, came an almost unheard thumping like the small animal’s heartbeat. Her eyes flashed wide open in the dark; she raised up on one elbow. The heart beating became a small vibration, then distant thunder. She rolled toward the roadway gravel to see two pinhole points of light on the road’s horizon. Now, she was on her knees, and then her feet were running to the road, and the pin lights became two burning orbs surrounded by unmuffled exhaust, flat out thumping through the countryside, a crackling explosion now.
(new) in the asparagus field
Felix turned his head to the fence where his family waited for him, but they were gone, as was the fence, as was his new asparagus crop just coming out of the ground. It was no longer daytime. A stunted tree had appeared next to his right shoulder coming out of the ground by the rocks. The outcropping was there by his other side, just as it had been when he had fallen. Now there was a low, iron railing surrounding the cairn, the tree and him. Beyond the railing was a cement sidewalk, streetlights and beyond that, there was a mammoth wall of human dwelling units.
