It was one of those steamy July days in Minnesota when hair expands to twice its normal size and clothes get damp and sticky right after you put them on. My dad’s stomach cancer surgery had been two months earlier. Now I was driving my folks to see the oncologist in Dad’s prized red Ford pick-up. During the eight short blocks to the clinic, he sat as unmoving as a stone. But his pain
It was the embrace of two women who understood. Maizie had spread the quilt across her bed and called her daughter to join her. She had been working on this quilt for almost twenty-five years but hadn’t shown it to Sunny until today.
“What’s wrong with you, Talley? You’re dead out there. On the floor? You know that? Dead.”
Talley knew. He knew it deeply, in the aching calcification of his bones and the sludge that had settled sedimentarily in his brain.
A never-ending skirmish was our version of a feuding David and Goliath, right-vs.-might, old-timer versus newcomer, downscale versus upscale conflict, guaranteed to make Dollar Island’s Gossip Hall of Fame.
Keith broke the water gasping, exhilarated. ‘A ten!’ he thought and swam toward the pool’s edge. He watched another diver enter. An eight. For a moment he bobbed at the edge.