To the sailors in the bleachers, the stain inching from Angelo Poffo’s flanks resembled a pair of dark, sticky wings. The rhythm, the friction, had husked the skin off his lower back. By the third hour, eight fingers laced under his head had fused together. A medic offstage twirled a scalpel in the flame of a Navy-issued Zippo.
Read MoreAt the team’s first practice, the new coach says, “Can I see you in my office?”
“I don’t know,” Amber says. “Can you?”
He has a room waiting for them at the Red Carpet Inn under a fake name. At the front desk, she will tell them she’s his daughter, there to pick up the room key her dad has left for her.
Read MoreMy cousin Stephanie, only four months older than me but always the first to do everything, has a boyfriend. This boyfriend lives in a neighborhood so lush and green that when they walk the sidewalks at night, the two of them passing a cigarette back and forth (she’s the first to smoke too), she imagines they are lightning bugs in a forest.
Read MoreHe said it was to absorb my power. The way they talk about cannibals in the movies. He said it was because he had a hole inside him that he stuffed and stuffed, but could never fill. I told him we all have holes and he said he knew it and it didn’t matter what I thought as he started with a toe, which I thought was unwise.
Read MoreA fortune-teller told me I had drowned myself in a previous life in Ancient China. Apparently my parents had arranged for me to marry a rich but old government official and, in absolute protest, my past self found a fast-moving river and jumped in, defiantly thinking Don’t you tell me what to do as I succumbed to the cold torrents.
Read MoreWhenever my mother had a migraine, she had us write a list of things we were afraid of on yellow legal pads. When we finished we pushed them under her locked bedroom door. My younger sister, Lesley (she had me call her Lola), who acted like my older sister, could crank out a list in sixty seconds flat. I cheated off her list sometimes.
Read MoreMy father was a bell maker. Bells of all sizes crowded his workspace, rows of molded crowns. Curved shoulders ranged across oiled parchment. The yokes, scrolled oak or simpler design, were fitted to the bell bodies, sonorous clappers tested repeatedly for the best sound.
Read MoreI am eleven turning twelve and I’m convinced Patti Smith is my mother and secretly lives in my neighborhood. I live in a town called Smithtown. This is only part of the reason I think Patti lives here.
Read More“Passing” was the verb we employed to describe the act of traveling to the other side. Passing was a thrill, a gorgeous kind of terror held within tight bounds. Permission to look at another world, one frightful and uncharted, all the while tethered safely to our own by seat belts and vigilant adults anchored to steering wheels.
Read MoreNAME: Niebyl, Owen
POSITION: Bus Driver
SCHOOL(S) SERVED: San Dieguito Union High School District
Read MoreIt wasn’t Alicia’s catechism teacher, her mother, or even her sister who taught Alicia the truth about God’s grace and the redemptive power of skin robes. It was her stepfather, Larry McBride.
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