His father had gone to the yard and his mother to a neighbor’s. The old house was empty around him, brittle and too clean. He thought of his miserable cave of a room in Paris; mold, mice, cockroaches and all, and he wished himself back there again. There were roses on the walls of that room, too,...
At the Batemans' house that evening there had been a great shifting of books so that Phyllis's office could work as a living room. George had piled them around the walls, behind the sofa, to the ceiling of the small closet off the hall. "You don't know how dirty books are until you get your hands...
It was the fall of 1981, and I was twenty-two years old. A few months earlier I had graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, and I was living in a two-r oom apartment in Lynn, Massachusetts, working as a carpenter’s helper by day and reading social theory by night. I was taking a year of...
Toward the Meadow A small wisp of gray smoke came from the Hemlocks’ cabin chimney. The cabin was set deeply in the ice, as if the ice around it were a clutching hand, cold rigid fingers curving over the roof and around the log walls. Inside the cabin the air was dead cold except for a small spac...
Wayne Facieux had placed the filing cabinet out from the wall so that it formed a room divider. This, he explained, would give the editors of The Quill some smattering of privacy in case any teacher ever did have time to come in and lounge. One reason no teacher ever came there, Kate supposed, wa...