A Column of The Miramichi Reader
All day they trudge through the creek sludge, looking for a hair, a thread from her red slippers, a fingernail she bit off. Last night’s downpour washed the muddy banks slippery as the metal slide in the playground. One, two, three, four silhouettes against the colorless sky, all with army experience, wearing camouflage, tramping grids …
Where exactly the giant egg was found is no longer remembered clearly. What is certain is that an egg of such a size had never been observed before and it dwarfed the sightseers who gathered to gawk at it. The immediate instinctive reaction was to attempt to crack it open right where it lay to …
On the drive into the city, I pass a crow with a bone in its beak. It perches atop a stop sign at the end of the Montlake exit from the 520 West. I can’t tell what kind of bone – maybe a turkey leg? Or maybe that’s just what I want to think, because …
I was born on the tail of a comet, a cluster of cosmic Chi, blind but seeing, cold and on fire, shooting in through my mother’s bedroom window. I smashed perfume bottles and pristine angel figurines, shattered time and space. My mother, still in bangs and barrettes, delivered me single-handedly by the light of a …
I’m taking the short cut through the park when I see him under the stand of poplars. He is staring into the bushes, a dog leash minus its dog looped around his left wrist. I stroll across, swishing leaves with the toes of my boots, loud enough for him to hear. I don’t like creeping …
She’s showering with the curtain open and then steps out and towels her hair her large breasts swaying as she puts one leg then the other on the tub to be dried off and she chooses her thong makes up her face with her painting kit and slips on her dress without a bra and …
I’m standing at the south rim of the Grand Canyon taking photographs of florid purple striations, of undulating rock walls that sink to alarming depths. But it is almost checkout time at my hotel, and I want to take a tub and use all their emollients, a habit my ex deplored. When a young couple …
I stay in my apartment on Pine Street with black-out drapes on my windows and triple locks on the door. I go out when it’s absolutely necessary, for groceries mostly, and when I come back, I say a prayer and I tiptoe in. I don’t want to find Mother at the stove, her shimmery shoulder …
On a still fall day, I walk through the woods near the river. My knee is behaving and I work up a sweat under my Mackinaw. I come across an old campsite. A rusted stove—white enamel peeling. Tin cans in a pile. There is a blackened jackknife folded and set with care on a cushion …
Emily arrived at the house as the sun rolled above the roofline, painting the drab weatherboards lemon, turning the last leaves of the Glory Tree gold. That was her name for the kowhai her father planted when she was born. In later years she used to lie beneath its branches pretending she was a princess …
The old man’s eyes lit up as the young man entered the living room. “Lovely to see you again,” the old man said. “Weren’t you here just the other day?” “Yes,” the young man said, his chest tightening. The old man’s head of white hair was combed and flattened, not a wisp out of place. …
Although the sun shone the day they took me to the hospital to have my wings removed, there were rumblings of a large storm brewing in the west. The doctor hmm-ed and ahh-ed and pursed his lips. Stepping back, he unfurled my left wing with clinical roughness, his fingers tracing each ligament with an unsettling …